Read More
At the recent ABA Board meeting (click here for related story), the Board approved the report of the ABA Nominating Committee, chaired this year by Lilla Weinberger (Readers' Books, Sonoma, California). The committee presented the Board with the names of three candidates for three-year terms as directors on the Board. (Under the current ABA Bylaws, each year three members of the nine-member Board come to the end of their terms.)
Read More
The Women's National Book Association (WNBA) has announced the names of 25 stores nominated for this year's Lucile Micheels Pannell Awards, which recognize "retail booksellers who excel at creatively bringing books and children together and inspiring children's interest in books and reading."
A Pannell Award will be presented to one general bookstore and one children's bookstore at BookExpo America, to be held May 1-5 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City.
The first ABA Booksellers Forum of 2002 took place at the DoubleTree Hotel in Atlanta on January 16, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. The forum was held after a busy day of ABA activities in Atlanta, which included meetings of the Strategic Planning Committee and the Governance Review Committee.
By Robin Whitten
The unabridged audiobook is easy for booksellers to understand: "Audiobooks the way books should be -- complete." Independent booksellers, once slow to embrace audiobooks precisely because titles were abridged, are in many cases welcoming the trend by audio publishers to offer more titles unabridged.
The next week-long intensive workshop, "Opening A Bookstore: The Business Essentials," will be held March 3 - 8 in Raleigh, North Carolina. More than a dozen book industry professionals will conduct training to introduce attendees to retail bookselling. From what it will cost to how much you'll make, from choosing a smart location to creating your initial inventory and selecting a computerized management system, attendees will learn the kinds of details that will help decide whether bookselling is the right choice and how to avoid common start-up pitfalls.
 Cheryl and Raymond Zadd, co-owners of Mail Hub Plus Books, have long been on the lookout for niches to fill in their community of Brecksville, Ohio. Midway between Akron and Cleveland, with a population of 13,000, Brecksville is a little too small to be courted by any of the big chain stores. And that's just fine with the Zadds. "There are no malls in Brecksville," Ray Zadd told BTW emphatically.
Bookstore sales in November remained resilient in the face of difficult economic conditions, registering a 5.9 percent increase over the previous November. Preliminary sales of $1,282 million for November 2001 compared favorably with the $1,211 million performance of November 2000.
November bookstore sales outperformed overall retail for the same period. Preliminary overall November retail sales of $299 billion were 4.9 percent better than the $285 billion in sales recorded the previous November.
Advanced Marketing Services, Inc. (AMS) announced on, January 17, that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Publishers Group West (PGW) for a reported price of about $38 million. Under the terms of the deal, PGW founder Charlie Winton will continue to serve as company president for the next year to implement the transition. AMS -- which has built its business on supplying warehouse price clubs and other large retailers -- had revenues last year of about $700 million, as reported by the New York Times. PGW had sales of over $125 million in 2001.
Random House has begun a reorganization of its company sales group. It is the first company-wide reorganization in three years, and Ruth Liebmann, director of independent bookselling for Random House, told BTW that a major impetus for the changes is that "a lot has changed in the last three years, in the marketplace, in the needs of booksellers, and in the needs of our publishers."
By Susan Salter Reynolds
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Poetry is in the front hall. Music in the living room. Books on books in the dining room. Science under the piano in the family room. Classics are in the little wooden bookshelf with glass-paneled doors, but only run through Aristotle before they spill over into the den. There are 4,000 books inside the house, 10,000 more in storage. Once, the pantry held cans and plates and no books. Now, the shelves are filled with pages.
For many booksellers, publisher co-operative promotions are an essential and cost-effective tool. As Dave Kaverman, co-owner of the Little Professor Book Company in Fort Wayne, Indiana, explained in a previous BTW piece last fall, utilizing publisher co-op allowances can help a store fulfill several goals at once: increasing a store's marketing exposure while also adding money to the bottom line.
A crowd estimated at between 450 and 550 packed A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco on January 11 to raise funds to help pay the legal fees of Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store, which has challenged a court order requiring it to turn over information about a customer's book purchases. The event raised $10,000 for the bookstore.
Pages
About ABA
The American Booksellers Association, a national not-for-profit trade organization, works with booksellers and industry partners to ensure the success and profitability of independently owned book retailers, and to assist in expanding the community of the book.
Independent bookstores act as community anchors; they serve a unique role in promoting the open exchange of ideas, enriching the cultural life of communities, and creating economically vibrant neighborhoods.
| |
Karl Kilian, owner of Brazos Bookstore in Houston, is determined to try to put his city and his store on the literary map. "[The University of] Houston has this very good writing program … and it's made serious inroads to the consciousness of the city. But we still don't figure in nationally," he told BTW. "When times were better, [Brazos] bookstore itself could hold events ... but we're off the map in terms of author tours."