Industry News

According to many booksellers, independents can now transmit the data for the Book Sense Bestseller List before you can say "Kingsolver." Since the list debuted in November 1999, its importance to book buyers, publishers, and media analysts -- as well as booksellers -- has increased dramatically.

Pulpwood Queens recommend Ann Packer’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier

Wildfires covered hundreds of thousands of acres in Colorado, as approximately 1,800 firefighters from around the country headed to the state to battle blazes that have erupted in severe drought conditions. By Thursday, approximately 90,000 acres in the foothills south of Denver were burning, and officials estimated that over 150,000 acres statewide were affected by a number of fires.

The launch of the Book Buyer’s Handbook online on April 25 has enabled ABA to add new data and to change incorrect information on an ongoing basis to provide booksellers with a comprehensive source for accurate, timely information about publishers’, wholesalers’, and distributors’ trade terms. In order to maintain the data’s accuracy, the association is seeking the help of booksellers, as well as publishers, in alerting handbook staff to new or changing terms.

A Brief Meditation on the Desires of Touring Authors

By Steve Almond

I was at the Phoenix airport, just in from L.A., and facing the prospect of having to read in a town where I knew, basically, no one.

Sarah Zacks, owner and founder of Books on the Square in Providence, Rhode Island, remembers the difficulty of toting one or more of her five children to downtown stores with few parking spaces and child-unfriendly sales people. That’s why, when she opened her bookstore 10 years ago, she selected a spot with good parking that was six blocks from the crowded Brown University area and away from the congested downtown.

On May 29, Olsson’s Books & Records, an independent book and record store with nine (soon to be eight) branches in the greater Washington, D.C., area, has announced that it will be closing its Georgetown store at the end of June.

Before 1989, Dr. Sharon Ames-Dennard -- who in April was named "2002 Working Mother of the Year" by Working Mother magazine -- had never set eyes on a black bookstore. There were none in her rural hometown of Cheapside, Virginia -- population 1,000 -- nor any in the areas of Florida where she attended graduate and undergraduate schools. But an internship in Los Angeles led her to the Aquarius, Eso Won Books, and other black bookstores in the area, where she discovered a new passion.

With War Emblem only one win away from horse racing’s triple crown, the USA Today book club’s second book selection is a fitting one: Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand (Ballantine Books), winner of this year’s BookSense Book of the Year Award for adult nonfiction. The national newspaper announced the selection Thursday, May 23.

This week, the American Library Association (ALA) announced that Joyce Meskis, owner of Denver, Colorado’s Tattered Cover Book Store, is the recipient of the 2002 John Phillip Immroth Memorial Award and the 2002 Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) Roll of Honor Award. Meskis and her colleagues at the Tattered Cover Book Store have won widespread acclaim as a result of the store’s legal battle in which it successfully defended the privacy rights of its customers.

Esteemed scientist, elegant essayist, and award-winning author Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20 of metastasized lung cancer at his home in New York City. He was 60 years old.

Leonard Shatzkin, author of In Cold Type, former book publishing executive, and consultant, died from congestive heart failure on Saturday, May 11, at the age of 82. Shatzkin's life was one of many remarkable achievements, throughout which his original, innovative, and oftentimes controversial ideas spurred many to think about the business of book publishing in new and better ways.

Preliminary March sales figures of $1,122 million were 3.7 percent off the $1,165 million of the previous March. While not a significant drop, it is disappointing when compared with bookstore performance over the last two years and when compared with overall retail recently.

Overall March retail sales for 2002 came in 2.8 percent over the $288 billion realized in March of 2001.

Ann Christophersen

This year’s Town Hall Meeting was filled with positive and constructive comments from attending booksellers.

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."