IndieCommerce

Plans to make Sony eReaders available for purchase from independent bookstores in time for this holiday season will not come to fruition despite the best efforts of the American Booksellers Association and others in the book industry. Work is ongoing, however, to provide indie booksellers with the ability to sell eReaders sometime in the future.

With consumer interest in e-reading on the rise, it's important to let customers know that they can buy e-books from you, through your store's ABA IndieCommerce website. Now, a time-tested selling tool -- the Indie Next List -- has been tapped to help in the effort.

E-books also benefit from the unique touch of the independent bookseller. Customers still need good book recommendations, and the Indie Next List brings together favorite handsells from independent booksellers across the U.S.

On Friday, November 27, the New York Times' lead editorial urged other states that collect sales tax to follow New York's example and pass e-fairness legislation.

Holiday catalogs from the New England, Northern California, and Southern California independent booksellers associations are now available through Drupal-based ABA IndieCommerce websites.

The catalogs are already installed and ready to go -- all that IndieCommerce sites need to do is link to the appropriate one:

The American Booksellers Association has made several announcements regarding its IndieCommerce and BookSense.com products:

Lars Townsend, who oversaw the launch of the Politics & Prose website on ABA IndieCommerce's Drupal platform, recently shared some thoughts on the benefits of having an e-commerce site in general and the advantages of the new Drupal platform specifically.

By Len Vlahos, ABA Chief Operating Officer

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." --Wayne Gretzky

E-book sales are rising rapidly, revolutionizing the publishing industry, and creating new opportunities for independent bookstores. Stores with ABA IndieCommerce sites are now fully equipped to sell more than 220,000 titles on their websites -- the key is getting the message out there.

Participation in IndieBound.org's Affiliate Program, which pays generous commissions on sales referred to ABA IndieCommerce sites, has been growing steadily. Last week, in fact, the Huffington Post became one of the newest IndieBound.org affiliates ... but not without encouragement from a number of indie booksellers as well as ABA.

In the past two weeks, 11 more ABA IndieCommerce sites have gone live on the program's new Drupal platform, which is earning high marks from booksellers and bringing an overall increase in traffic to ABA member sites.

On September 24, the American Booksellers Association wrote to the Arizona Department of Revenue to point out, once again, that Amazon.com's distribution facilities in Phoenix and Goodyear, Arizona, constitute a physical presence in the state and require the online giant to collect and remit sales tax for purchases made by Arizona residents.

Since migrating to the new, open-source Drupal platform, 84 ABA IndieCommerce sites are experiencing greater stability and better performance. The overall result has been an increase in both traffic and sales for migrated sites. In addition, the IndieCommerce program as a whole has reached a tipping point: more consumer traffic is now going to the sites on Drupal than to the sites that have yet to migrate.

A number of indie booksellers will soon be participating in Symtio, an innovative platform that allows customers to purchase e-books and audiobooks in stores and then download them anywhere there's an Internet connection. When consumers purchase books in the form of Symptio product cards (which look like book covers), the cards are activated at the register.

ABA member stores with IndieCommerce websites on the Drupal platform now have the ability to sell more than 220,000 e-books in several formats, including Adobe, Palm, and Microsoft. The new functionality allows consumers to purchase e-books and to have those books downloaded from store sites to consumers' computers and/or handheld devices.

More than 70 ABA members have now migrated their store websites to Drupal, the new ABA IndieCommerce platform, with 24 launching since early August.