Six weeks after Hurricane Sandy shut down much of lower Manhattan, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression has returned to its fourth-floor offices on Fulton Street in the South Street Seaport.

Simon & Schuster has created a Hurricane Sandy relief effort that offers multiple copies of 20 new releases and bestsellers free of charge to  retail accounts damaged by the storm.

The Book Industry Charitable Foundation’s first major fundraising event, titled Zombie Apocalypse!, brought more than 100 supporters to downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan, on October 27 and raised more than $10,000 to benefit programs to support bookstore employees across the country.

Several ABA member bookstores affected by last week’s hurricane are still working towards recovery. Among them are Bank Square Books, which has been closed due to severe flooding since last Monday, and New Jersey’s BookTowne, which has been closed for 10 days due to power failure.

As ABA’s offices were returning to normal operations on the Monday following Hurricane Sandy, the association’s Member Relationship Managers were reaching out to bookstores in affected areas to assure them that ABA is available to help in any way that it can.

Due to ongoing Hurricane Sandy-related power, phone, and Internet outages in New York, ABA operations are significantly affected. Our staff’s ability to receive and to respond to communications is very limited.

This week, the American Booksellers Association and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation announced that they have entered into an agreement to offer a financial assistance program for employees of independent bookstores who are experiencing an emergency financial hardship.

Christine Onorati of WORD and Kelly Justice of Fountain Bookstore offer tips to increase online sales and to ensure your customers know that your website is always open for business.

Wednesday at Wi7 will be capped by an interview of award-winning historian Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, by Bob Minzesheimer of USA Today. Here Brinkley talks about the heroes and bad faith players in Hurricane Katrina, indie booksellers’ role in the area’s economic recovery, and his upcoming titles.

With much hard work and the help of family and community members, Lisa Sullivan hopes to reopen Bartleby’s Books before Thanksgiving. The Wilmington, Vermont, bookstore was almost totally destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Irene.