The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which will mark its 20th anniversary at BEA, is issuing a timeline that highlights some of the battles it has fought.

emotionGallery, a French company with a new line of innovative bookmarks using lenticular images to create animated and 3D effects, will contribute $1 to ABFFE for every 10 bookmarks distributed by independent bookstores.

Former Congressman Tom Allen, the president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, will moderate a debate at BEA over the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down limits on the money that corporations can spend in political campaigns.

By Chris Finan, President of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression

It sounded like just one more piece of bad news.

The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court announced in January that it was striking down a ban on campaign spending by corporations.

In a significant First Amendment decision, on Tuesday, April 20, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 8-1, declared unconstitutional a law banning photos, film, and video depictions of animal cruelty and, in doing so, rejected the federal government's attempt to create a new exception to the First Amendment. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., noted that the law "created a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth," which could have made the sale of magazines or videos showing hunting a crime in Washington, D.C., where hunting is illegal.

The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) is seeking bookstores to become plaintiffs in challenges to new censorship laws in Alaska and Massachusetts. The laws ban the electronic communications of material that is "harmful to minors," including the display of "harmful" book jackets and excerpts on bookstore websites.

The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) will host a program at BookExpo America that will explore the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down limits on the money corporations can spend in political campaigns.

HarperCollins Vice President for Independent Retailing Carl Lennertz has pulled together a second collection of regional essays inspired by State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, Ecco). Booksellers and librarians from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska contributed to the Pacific Northwest Reader, which is available now. The first regional collection, the Great Lakes Reader, was published last year.

 The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) has welcomed an April 15 federal appeals court ruling that held that an Ohio statute that imposes fines and prison terms for providing non-obscene, sexuallyexplicit material to minors cannot be applied to communications on websites, in public chatrooms, and through e-mail listservs and mailing lists.

The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) is working with Alaska booksellers and other free speech organizations to oppose House Bill 298, which bans the sale of sexual material to minors, because two provisions of the bill remain unconstitutional.