BookSense.com sites will experience significant downtime this weekend as a new production database and server are brought online. When completed, the upgrade will result in increased speed and stability for participants' Web sites. Most of the downtime is expected to occur during the first half of Sunday.

This week, Book Sense announced that booksellers can now process Book Sense Gift Cards through an enhanced and optional feature of IBID, Version 14. This new way to process gift cards is being offered to complement the other methods already available from Givex. (For more on the different ways to process Book Sense gift cards, click here.)

Over the weekend of November 13, BookSense.com will bring its new production database and servers online. While the result of the upgrade will mean increased speed and stability for BookSense.com participants' Web sites, BookSense.com members should be prepared for significant downtime on Saturday, November 13, and Sunday, November 14.

The success of a bookstore's Web site is directly dependent on the bookseller's efforts to market it, stressed Len Vlahos, BookSense.com director. "In some ways, a storefront retailer's Web site functions as an extension of the store, and, in other ways, as an additional location," Vlahos said.

Starting November 1, BookSense.com Co-op Reimbursement Program participants will be able to take advantage of a special offer from Algonquin Books. The publisher has created a promotion around Marlena de Blasi's A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure.

On Wednesday, October 6, Google announced the launch of a new search technology designed to help publishers sell books online, as reported by Reuters. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, plan to hold a press conference on Thursday, October 7, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which Reuters described as "an important showcase if the Internet search engine is to recruit the heavyweights of the book publishing industry."

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.

A number of booksellers with BookSense.com Web sites have recently reported a new twist to the problem of fraudulent orders. In addition to orders for large numbers of Bibles and medical texts, booksellers are now seeing fraudulent orders for popular trade titles, sometimes with expedited shipping, and with domestic billing and shipping addresses.

BookSense.com has begun offering detailed traffic reports on an individual store basis. This service, which was developed in response to booksellers' requests, provides data showing how many visitors come to a bookstore's site, which pages they're visiting, when they're visiting, and much more.

On Tuesday, June 29, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld a lower court ruling barring enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) and remanded the case back to District Court. A broad group of plaintiffs -- including the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco and West Hollywood, City Lights in San Francisco, and Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon -- hailed the decision as a victory for the First Amendment.