Technology

This week, the American Booksellers Association announced a new partnership with Above the Treeline, LLC, which provides an online software product designed to help bookstores improve finances by optimizing inventory selection.

This week, Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colorado, in partnership with BurstMarketing, launched a free, weekly podcast show, Authors on Tour -- Live, on the web at www.authorsontourlive.com. The podcasts feature recently published authors reading from and discussing their books at events at one of Tattered Cover's three locations. Each show is approximately 30 to 45 minutes.

By Fred Hoffman

While it might not be as well-publicized as "Y2K," a potentially very serious computer systems problem looms on the horizon for some book retailers: In the near future, the book community will run out of unique 10-digit ISBNs, and, to ward off the possible repetition of ISBN numbers, there is a transition currently underway from a 10-digit ISBN to an ISBN- or EAN-13 identifier.

Partnership With BookstreamInc. to Bring More Content to Independent Bookstore Web Sites

In the time you may spend browsing in a bookstore for the right book, you can now publish one of your own. With advances in Print-On-Demand (POD) technology, the equipment is easy, fast, and small enough to operate in a 5,000-square-foot bookstore.

It may not be as sexy as Y2K, but it has the same potential to cause chaos for booksellers, publishers, and vendors if their inventory management and POS systems are not ready for the major evolution that will take place in the unique identifiers for books as well as other products sold in the North American market in the next few years. Most notable among the changes, the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) will expand to 13 digits from 10 digits, effective January 1, 2007.

On January 29, Ingram Book Group unveiled "pubsource," a new enhancement to its "ipage" Web site that provides booksellers with the ability to check availability and purchase book products directly from three participating publishers: Random House, Holtzbrinck Publishers Group, and HarperCollins.

ABA Marketing Director Jill Perlstein provides booksellers with her impressions of the National Retail Federation's (NRF) 92nd Annual Convention & Expo, which was held on January 12 - 15 at New York City's Jacob Javits Convention Center.

The past few months have turned out to be quite volatile for the eBook industry. In June, Gemstar-TV Guide International decided to drop out of the eBook business. This was followed by PalmGear's acquisition of Palm Digital Media, which produces eBook reading software and is an eBook supplier, and, then, Barnesandnoble.com dropped a bombshell in September when it announced that it would no longer carry eBooks.

As the trade and consumer recognition of the Book Sense Bestseller list grows, bookstores that do not yet regularly report to the list have the potential of significantly helping to widen the scope and awareness of the list. Publishers already look to the Book Sense Bestseller lists as an accurate barometer of trends within the independent bookselling community, and consumer awareness of the bestseller lists (and the Book Sense program in general) is growing rapidly.

The retailing industry in the U.S. and Canada is in the process of aligning itself with the rest of the world in a standard approach to product identification. The Uniform Code Council (UCC) has established January 1, 2005, as 2005 Sunrise, the date for general retailing in the U.S. and Canada to have the capability to scan, store, and process not only the 12-digit UPC code currently in use, but also the EAN/UCC 13-symbol code used in the rest of the world.

The FBI's expanded authority under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act allowing it to secretly request and serve a subpoena for bookstore and library records has spurred a small number of booksellers to ask their point-of-sale (POS) systems vendors to purge their databases of customers' title-specific purchase records, according to vendors who spoke to BTW.

The book industry and the press are increasingly depending on Nielsen BookScan for figures on book sales from across all retail channels, and Nielsen BookScan estimates that currently its data represents between 70 and 75 percent of the entire bookselling market.

John Rubin, a former management consultant who made his living working with huge corporations such as FedEx and Nabisco, is now hoping to help independent booksellers. Rubin's company, Rubin Venture Consulting, recently rolled out its new online software product, Above the Treeline, a tool meant to help bookstores improve finances by controlling inventory costs and increasing staffing efficiency.

BookExpo America (BEA), in partnership with the Open eBook Forum (www.openebook.org), will present the eBook Experience, a unique business and learning environment, at this year's convention in Los Angeles, May 29 - June 1. The special interactive center will provide book industry professionals with the opportunity to learn about the latest digital technology on display by participating exhibitors.