Book Sense

As announced by ABA in October, after December 31, 2004, the association will no longer sell Book Sense Paper Gift Certificates to stores. Orders for gift certificates to meet bookstores' post-holiday needs may be placed until then by calling (800) 637-0037, ext. 1292 or 1293.

As of December 7, there are 307 bookstores in 46 states participating in the Book Sense Gift Card Program, and there are three easy ways for booksellers to refer holiday shoppers to participating locations:

On December 9, Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary reported that "for the first time since they began circulating in the 1990s, those little plastic gift cards will replace apparel as the top gift," according to the 19th Annual Consumer Survey of Holiday Retail Spending Plans and Trends, commissioned by Deloitte & Touche.

For the four-week period ending December 12, 2004, and based on reporting from hundreds of independent booksellers nationwide.

Past Category Bestseller lists are available at www.bookweb.org/read/5677.

Attention Media: Please contact Meg Smith at [email protected] for reprint guidelines for your newspaper or magazine.

On Tuesday, December 14, author Sue Monk Kidd, an indie favorite and 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Award-winner for The Secret Life of Bees (Penguin), chose Stephanie Kallos' new novel Broken for You (Grove) as the next title to be read by the NBC Today Show's Today Book Club.

Over the last few months, the American Booksellers Association has reorganized the responsibilities of some of its key staff to better meet the needs of its members. Among the changes, ABA has designated BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos to spearhead an effort to evaluate and reinvigorate the association's educational offerings, in addition to his other responsibilities. Working with Vlahos on the project is Kristen Gilligan, who was recently named associate director of programming and constituent groups liaison.

This Friday, December 10, is the deadline for the Book Sense 2005 Valentine's Day Top Ten. This list is compiled in conjunction with the Association of American Publishers' (AAP) Get Caught Reading initiative and is part of a series of seasonal Top Ten lists that Book Sense and AAP produce each year based on the nominations of independent booksellers nationwide.

Holiday catalogs developed by the New Atlantic Independent, Pacific Northwest, Southeast, Southern California, and Upper Midwest booksellers associations are now featured on the BookSense.com hub site and are available for upload to participating BookSense.com sites. BookSense.com participants within each region were recently sent instructions about adding a regional holiday catalog to their site and their homepage.

Your store may only sell one or two Book Sense gift card designs, but there are nine different card designs that may be brought into your store for redemption.

In addition to the five original Book Sense gift card designs -- Tome Dark, Tome Lite, Modern Reader, Bookworm, and El Libro -- there are three publisher-sponsored cards on the market, as well as a custom-designed card from Warwick's of La Jolla, California.

Barrington Books in Barrington, Rhode Island, was founded in 1986 as a Little Professor franchise, but it ended its contract three-and-a-half years ago and was renamed. Owners Tony and Celeste Allen held a renaming contest for the 4,100-square-foot store and received 800 entries from customers.

This week, Book Sense and POS vendor Booklog announced that users of Booklog, Version 6, could begin selling and redeeming Book Sense gift cards directly from the cash register. Booklog is the third POS vendor to integrate with the Book Sense Gift Card Program, which is administered by Givex. Computac/Square One users processing credit cards though PCCharge have had integration since November 2003. And this past November, IBID, Version 14 began offering booksellers the option of processing Book Sense gift cards through an enhanced, optional feature.

Here is a preview of the January 2005 Book Sense Picks. Independent booksellers in the Book Sense program will receive the Picks fliers in the December Red Box.

The picks flier is designed for stores to use during the month of January, and it is one component of the monthly Picks program, which also includes a downloadable PDF flier of 20 additional titles and shelf-talkers for those titles. These will be available online at www.bookweb.org/read/6977 in the next few weeks.