On Wednesday, January 10, ABA's new Digital Task Force (DTF) held its first meeting at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, in Brooklyn, New York.

The DTF is composed of 10 booksellers and industry professionals and five ABA staff members, and it is charged with looking at the myriad technical changes affecting the world of consumer book consumption, from the digitization of content to the burgeoning world of online social networking. The goal of the DTF will be to help advise ABA on devising strategies to address these issues.

In this first On the Move of the New Year, BookSense.com presents a report on website sales during the holiday season, improvements to inventory upload features, ISBN-13 compatibility, digital content, a new content management system, and more.

Holiday Sales

BookSense.com announced that participants saw a double-digit increase in orders placed during the 2006 holiday selling season and that aggregate sales are up once again.

At the end of November, Pubnet unveiled Instant Response, a program that gives booksellers immediate acknowledgement for purchase orders placed with participating publishers. Instant Response was also introduced as an alternative to direct electronic order (DEO) dial-up systems, which some publishers will be phasing out after the introduction of ISBN-13 in January 2007.

The American Booksellers Association has signed an agreement with Ingram Digital Ventures that will enable bookstores participating in the BookSense.com program to sell ebooks in three formats -- Palm, Adobe, and Microsoft -- beginning sometime in 2007.

Pubnet, an electronic ordering option for booksellers from Bowker, has announced the introduction of Instant Response, a program that gives booksellers immediate acknowledgement for purchase orders placed with participating publishers. In addition, Instant Response is designed to serve as an alternative to a publisher's direct electronic dial-up ordering system. According to Pubnet, it is anticipated that some publishers will be phasing out such systems after the introduction of ISBN-13 in January 2007.

If data is the name of the game, it's crucial that independent bookstores make sure they are represented in the starting lineup. One of the best ways for ABA member stores to do so is by facilitating the collection of independent bookstore sales data via confidential reporting to the Book Sense Bestseller List.

Last week, in a series of meetings arranged by the American Booksellers Association, U.S. publishers and wholesalers had the opportunity to learn about batch.co.uk, a service of the Booksellers Association of the United Kingdom and Ireland, that is designed to help reduce overhead in the supply chain by providing a single, consolidated payment solution.

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) recently announced that it had received several reports of books carrying a Bookland EAN bar code with an erroneous number encoded in the bar code and displayed below the bar code itself. "The erroneous number begins with '979', an invalid prefix for today's Bookland EAN and an ISBN range not yet activated by International or National ISBN Agencies," said the BISG statement. "The erroneous number is unlikely to be recognized by the computer systems of many booksellers who are not yet prepared for ISBN-13.

Book Sense and Earthcomber, a mobile marketing service that matches people on the go with their personal interests, have partnered to offer the directory of Book Sense store locations in a mobile GPS-enabled format for Palm OS and Windows Mobile PDAs and smart phones.