Industry News

The USA Today book club has chosen Walter Mosley’s Bad Boy Brawly Brown as its latest selection. The newspaper announced its third choice -- and the first cloth title -- in its July 2 edition.

The coming weeks will see the launch of significant new promotional opportunities for independent bookstores participating in the Book Sense national marketing program.

Linda Ramsdell, owner of the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vermont, is hanging up her bookseller’s hat for a few days and donning both author escort and limo driver’s caps to add a new dimension to New England handselling. The author Ramsdell will escort, from June 30 to July 3, is Michael Crummey (Book Sense 76 Pick River Thieves, Houghton Mifflin), and the limo is her Subaru Impreza.

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 United States government filed a notice of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging a federal court’s ruling that the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) violated the First Amendment. The CIPA statute provided for a direct appeal from the panel decision directly to the Supreme Court.

The House Judiciary Committee wants to know how many subpoenas the Justice Department has issued to bookstores, libraries, and newspapers under a provision of the USA PATRIOT Act.

On June 28, a new and improved Sarasota News & Books in Sarasota, Florida, will reopen after a disastrous plumbing accident on March 27 left the store with extensive structural damage and a complete loss of usable inventory. (For the full story about the flood, click here.)

Dan Combs, director of digital government for the State of Iowa, has told Bookselling This Week that Iowa’s Information Technology Department (ITD) is in the process of moving the direct link to Amazon.com from the homepage of its official state Web site, www.iowa.gov. This feature will be replaced by a link directing consumers to a new page that will include links to both Amazon.com and BookSense.com, the e-commerce component of the Book Sense national marketing campaign.

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.

A growing number of independent booksellers are using the BookScan service to report to the Book Sense Bestseller List.

New volunteer booksellers have joined in key ABA activities, on both the Booksellers Advisory Council (BAC) and the ABA Nominating Committee. The booksellers were appointed by incoming ABA President Ann Christophersen of Chicago’s Women & Children First, and the appointments were unanimously approved by the ABA Board at its recent May meeting.

The members of the 2003 Nominating Committee are:

Bookstore sales for April stabilized, reversing the downward trend of the past two months by eking out a slight increase over April 2001. However, April is the third month in a row in which bookstore sales failed to keep pace with overall retail.

Preliminary April bookstore sales figures of $1,042 million were 0.8 percent better than the $1,034 million of the previous April.

Overall retail sales of $297 billion for April 2002 came in 4.9 percent over the $283 billion realized in April 2001.

Booksellers should by now have received a letter from ABA describing the official launch of the ABA Book Buyer’s Handbook Online, which can be found at http://handbook.bookweb.org/ or via the Book Buyer’s Handbook icon at BookWeb.org.

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:

The following profile of independent bookselling in Chicago, and of ABA’s new president, Ann Christophersen of Women & Children First, originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.

By Lee Copeland

Ann Christophersen has been battling a turf war with Borders for the last two years.

The bookselling giant wants to open a 20,000-square-foot store in Uptown, about a mile from her Andersonville shop -- Women & Children First Bookstore.