BookSense.com reminds booksellers that websites will be down from 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, June 10, through Saturday evening, June 11. Customers will be presented with a "Down for Maintenance" page during this time, when the BookSense.com servers will be moved to a new location. Normal service will be restored by Sunday, June 12. The server move is being undertaken to facilitate maintenance and to control costs.

On April 16, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., delegates of the Streamlined Sales Tax Implementing States (SSTIS) agreed to amend some portions of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA) in an effort to keep sales tax simplification on schedule for October 1, as reported by Washington Retail Insight (WRI), a newsletter of the National Retail Federation. SSUTA would help states begin to recover from years of budgetary shortfalls by collecting revenue lost through catalog and Internet purchases.

Seattle-based Internet retailer Amazon.com has recently acted less like a big seller and more like a big buyer. In a period of less than two weeks, the company has purchased BookSurge LLC, a print-on-demand company based in Charleston, South Carolina, and Mobipocket.com SA, an e-book and e-book software company based in France. It has also reportedly been soliciting literary agents in an effort to publish and sell exclusive material from big-name authors.

Booksellers caught up in the myriad details of running both a bricks-and-mortar and virtual bookstore may give little thought to the importance of affiliate programs, but as anyone who has spent time surfing the Web knows, affiliate links are as commonplace on websites as billboards are on highways. And just as a billboard can lead a hungry driver to a restaurant or a fatigued traveler to a motel, an affiliate link on an author's website can be very effective at driving consumers to a bookseller's site.

In the classic baseball movie Field of Dreams, the mantra repeated throughout the film is, "If you build it, they will come." Not so with websites.

When Brian Sweet of Trail's End Bookstore in Winthrop, Washington, wanted to refresh his store's offering of greeting cards, he took his quest for new suppliers to the newly redesigned Idea Exchange on the ABA Web site, www.BookWeb.org.

Holiday catalogs developed by the New Atlantic Independent, Pacific Northwest, Southeast, Southern California, and Upper Midwest booksellers associations are now featured on the BookSense.com hub site and are available for upload to participating BookSense.com sites. BookSense.com participants within each region were recently sent instructions about adding a regional holiday catalog to their site and their homepage.

This week, Book Sense and POS vendor Booklog announced that users of Booklog, Version 6, could begin selling and redeeming Book Sense gift cards directly from the cash register. Booklog is the third POS vendor to integrate with the Book Sense Gift Card Program, which is administered by Givex. Computac/Square One users processing credit cards though PCCharge have had integration since November 2003. And this past November, IBID, Version 14 began offering booksellers the option of processing Book Sense gift cards through an enhanced, optional feature.

On November 19, in a speech on the Senate floor, Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), after commending Congress for extending the moratorium on Internet access taxes for the next four years, called on Congress and President Bush to refocus their energies on his Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Act (SSUTA, S.1736). Enzi and Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduced the bill, which would ensure that the tax system is fair to Main Street businesses, in October 2003.

Last weekend, BookSense.com brought a new production database and server online, and now, with the upgrade complete, it's time for BookSense.com participants and their customers to enjoy the increased speed and stability of bookstores' BookSense.com Web sites.