The first Pacific Northwest Independent Bestseller List, published in a cooperative effort between Book Sense and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA), is making its debut this week. The PNBA list is the third regional Book Sense bestseller list, joining lists published in conjunction with the New England Booksellers Association and Southeast Booksellers Association.

On June 20, the owners and managers of nine American Booksellers Association member stores in Iowa mailed a letter to Governor Tom Vilsack and Iowa’s Information Technology Department (ITD) expressing their concern over an exclusive Amazon.com link on the official state Web site, www.iowa.gov.

The fall trade show season will begin with the Mid-South Booksellers Association show, to be held on September 5 - 8 in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the weeks following, there will be nine more shows, and Bookselling This Week will provide complete pre- and post-show coverage for all of them.

Look for BTW’s pre-show coverage to begin in mid-July.

Here is a list of the fall shows:

By Scott Foley

The Southeast Booksellers Association (SEBA) recently announced the winners of the SEBA Book Awards. The winners of the 2002 awards will be honored at the "Rep Appreciation, Book Awards, and More Celebration" at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida on Thursday, September 19. The Awards are given to recognize the year's best books either by a Southern author or set in the South.

This year’s winners are:

The Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association (MPBA) has announced the winners of the association's 2002 Regional Book Awards, which are presented annually "to honor outstanding books set in our region that were published in the prior year."

The 2002 Regional Book Award winners are:

An average 11 percent square-footage increase in 2001 to New England Booksellers Association stores can be interpreted several ways, but, as executive director Rusty Drugan said of the latest survey, "This expansion does speak to the fact that business may be better. And it certainly speaks to the confidence of the store owners."

When booksellers from Kansas to Louisiana and all points in between travel hundreds of miles in the middle of the week to meet for three hours in Dallas, they want to accomplish a lot. And they did on April 10 in Dallas -- according to a number of booksellers who attended both an ABA Booksellers Forum and bookseller programming, which was sponsored by the Mid-South Independent Booksellers Association (MSIBA). Both events were hosted by The Enchanted Forest Bookstore.

The Upper Midwest Booksellers Association's (UMBA) Spring Meeting and Seminar was held from April 13 to 14 at the Edgewater Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin. The well-attended event included an ABA Booksellers Forum, a booksellers’ roundtable on co-op advertising, and an author/publisher cocktail party on Saturday; it finished on Sunday with a financial seminar led by ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz from 9:00 a.m to noon.

Over 20 booksellers attended an ABA Booksellers Forum on April 11 from 10:00 a.m. to noon in the Writers and Readers Room at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts. Held in conjunction with the New England Booksellers Association (NEBA), the forum covered a wide range of issues, including ABA’s future goals, the recent Tattered Cover court victory, and questions regarding music royalties.