E-commerce

As suburban sprawl threatens to overcome more and more communities, independent booksellers are facing battles on many fronts, from fighting proposed chain store developments in their communities to competing with online giants. It is a market landscape that is very familiar to Tom Campbell of Durham, North Carolina's The Regulator Bookshop.

With BookExpo America (BEA) about three weeks away, here is a look at a few BookSense.com-related happenings scheduled for the trade show -- as well as one BookSense.com housekeeping item.

As has become tradition at BEA, BookSense.com is holding a BookSense.com Users Group Meeting on the opening morning of the trade show. The session is scheduled for Friday, May 19, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. in Room 150B at the Convention Center.

Last week, ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz sent letters to Steve Riggio, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, Inc., and Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, in which he encouraged them to join the American Booksellers Association and other retailers in the fight for e-fairness.

On Wednesday, February 8, representatives from Amazon.com and eBay Inc. told the U.S. House of Representative's Small Business Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform and Oversight that collecting sales tax on online purchases is within the industry's capabilities.

BookSense.com recently announced its first group of new features for 2006, as well as other important news:

A fraudulent order scheme, which first came to the attention of the American Booksellers Association in October through a discussion on BookWeb's Idea Exchange, continues to plague booksellers from coast-to-coast, with reports coming in from booksellers spanning from the Southeast to the Pacific Northwest. The scam involves a person posing as a teacher of sewing classes who asks the bookstore to order several sewing titles for a class to be held in the area.

Booksellers posting to BookWeb's Idea Exchange have reported a fraudulent order scheme that appears to have been replicated in several different cities. The scam involves a person posing as a teacher of sewing classes who asks the bookstore to order several sewing titles for a class to be held in the area. The "teacher" then promises to tell students to buy the book at the store in question.

A letter from Chris Morrow of Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont, followed by letters from other local independent booksellers, recently convinced Vermont Public Radio (VPR) to remove a link to Amazon.com from its website, www.vpr.net/, and to replace it with one to BookSense.com.

On Friday, June 10, BookSense.com moved its servers to a new location, closer to ABA's office, allowing for easier maintenance and resulting in significant cost savings. BookSense.com sites were brought down at approximately 2:30 Eastern Time on Friday afternoon and were made live again at about midnight on the same day. Total down time was just under 10 hours.

BookSense.com's servers are being moved this Friday, June 10. Customers attempting to access BookSense.com websites during the move will see a "We're Down for Maintenance" page.

Booksellers' websites and admin pages will be inaccessible beginning at approximately 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, June 10. Access is expected to be restored by midday on Saturday, June 11, but it is possible that it may take the entire weekend to deal with unforeseen events.

BookSense.com websites will be down from 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, June 10, through Saturday evening, June 11. Customers will be presented with a "Down for Maintenance" page during this time, when BookSense.com will be moving its servers to a new location. Normal service will be restored by Sunday, June 12.

BookSense.com reminds booksellers that websites will be down from 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, June 10, through Saturday evening, June 11. Customers will be presented with a "Down for Maintenance" page during this time, when the BookSense.com servers will be moved to a new location. Normal service will be restored by Sunday, June 12. The server move is being undertaken to facilitate maintenance and to control costs.

On April 16, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., delegates of the Streamlined Sales Tax Implementing States (SSTIS) agreed to amend some portions of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA) in an effort to keep sales tax simplification on schedule for October 1, as reported by Washington Retail Insight (WRI), a newsletter of the National Retail Federation. SSUTA would help states begin to recover from years of budgetary shortfalls by collecting revenue lost through catalog and Internet purchases.

Seattle-based Internet retailer Amazon.com has recently acted less like a big seller and more like a big buyer. In a period of less than two weeks, the company has purchased BookSurge LLC, a print-on-demand company based in Charleston, South Carolina, and Mobipocket.com SA, an e-book and e-book software company based in France. It has also reportedly been soliciting literary agents in an effort to publish and sell exclusive material from big-name authors.

Booksellers caught up in the myriad details of running both a bricks-and-mortar and virtual bookstore may give little thought to the importance of affiliate programs, but as anyone who has spent time surfing the Web knows, affiliate links are as commonplace on websites as billboards are on highways. And just as a billboard can lead a hungry driver to a restaurant or a fatigued traveler to a motel, an affiliate link on an author's website can be very effective at driving consumers to a bookseller's site.