Industry News

FSG Launches Classics Series

On August 31, Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced the launch of FSG Classics, a new line of paperback reissues. Encompassing both fiction and nonfiction, FSG Classics will include works that are still widely read, as well as those that have "somehow been forgotten." Each new book will include a new introduction by a contemporary writer.

The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association's (NCIBA) fall trade show will be held from Friday, October 1, to Sunday, October 3, at the Oakland Convention Center/Oakland Marriott in Oakland. Once again, this year's trade show will feature a stellar lineup of authors and a wide array of educational programming.

The arrival of September marks the final weeks of the Campaign for Reader Privacy petition drive, and ABA is urging booksellers to make one last push to collect the maximum number of customer signatures.

This past weekend, ABA completed software programming to integrate its new association membership database with the BookWeb.org and Book Buyer's Handbook Web sites. These changes have created the need for members to re-enter their user names and passwords to gain access to members-only sections of the sites.

Jessica Stockton of Three Lives & Company in New York City was recently named the winner of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association's contest that asked booksellers to write an essay that began with "I am a bookseller because …"

Corporate conglomerates and billion-dollar IPOs aren't the only newsmakers on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, August 24, readers of the Journal were treated to an in-depth portrait of independent bookseller Neil Van Uum. Van Uum is the owner of Joseph-Beth Booksellers, with one store in Lexington, Kentucky; one each in Cleveland and Cincinnati; and the Tennessee-based Davis-Kidd Booksellers, with three stores in the state -- one each in Nashville, Jackson, and Memphis.

The controversy over the unavailability of the bestselling Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, by John O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi (Regnery), has placed booksellers squarely in the middle of a political maelstrom.

After surviving the stock market crash of 1929, World War II, a couple of recessions, and a four-alarm fire, Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore in Salt Lake City, Utah, is celebrating its 75th anniversary this August. What started out as a furniture and used-book store has evolved into a four-floor, 40,000-square-foot institution with six miles of bookshelves and approximately one million titles.

With the final phase of the Campaign for Reader Privacy (www.readerprivacy.com) nearing, ABA is encouraging all booksellers to intensify their efforts to collect signatures for the grassroots petition drive to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

The last full-week workshop of 2004 for prospective booksellers, sponsored by the Paz & Associates Bookstore Training & Consulting Group in conjunction with the American Booksellers Association, will be held from Monday, September 13, through Friday, September 17, at The Reserve at Cherry Creek in Denver, Colorado.

Perpetrators of fraudulent order schemes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, as evidenced by the frequency and variety of scams reported by ABA member bookstores. Unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule for identifying a fraudulent order, but booksellers are being urged to err on the side of caution.

Among the most easily identifiable scams are orders originating in Nigeria or another African nation for large numbers of medical books, textbooks, technical books, or bibles. A stolen credit card is usually offered as the means of payment.

For some it was the storm that wasn't, but for others, whose businesses and homes along Florida's Gulf Coast were barraged with winds up to 145 miles per hour, Hurricane Charley was the source of devastation and injury. Most booksellers contacted by Bookselling This Week fared well through the storm, one of the worst in recent memory. Representatives of LIBRIS, the ABA-sponsored bookstore insurer, told BTW that all of the 20 bookstores in Florida covered by LIBRIS had been contacted and none were claiming property damage to their stores.

The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association (MPBA) Fall Trade Show will be held from Thursday, September 16, through Sunday, September 19, at the Marriott Denver Tech Center in Denver. This year's show will once again feature educational panels and the Saturday Night Author Reception. And, in response to the popularity of last year's reception, a Friday Night Author Reception has been added.

The number-one goal of ABA's strategic plan is to "provide independent professional booksellers with access to the education, information, and business services they need to succeed in a changing world." With this in mind, the ABA Board of Directors and staff are embarking on a program to grow ABA's educational offerings and are seeking bookseller input through the "ABA Education 2005 Survey." This week, a link to the survey was sent to ABA members via e-mail.

In October 2002, the New England Booksellers Association (NEBA) launched Read Around New England (RANE), a unique, 10-day celebration designed to highlight New England's rich literary talent and diverse array of independent bookstores. A year later, the event was expanded to one month.