IndieCommerce

Since migrating to the new, open-source Drupal platform, 84 ABA IndieCommerce sites are experiencing greater stability and better performance. The overall result has been an increase in both traffic and sales for migrated sites. In addition, the IndieCommerce program as a whole has reached a tipping point: more consumer traffic is now going to the sites on Drupal than to the sites that have yet to migrate.

A number of indie booksellers will soon be participating in Symtio, an innovative platform that allows customers to purchase e-books and audiobooks in stores and then download them anywhere there's an Internet connection. When consumers purchase books in the form of Symptio product cards (which look like book covers), the cards are activated at the register.

ABA member stores with IndieCommerce websites on the Drupal platform now have the ability to sell more than 220,000 e-books in several formats, including Adobe, Palm, and Microsoft. The new functionality allows consumers to purchase e-books and to have those books downloaded from store sites to consumers' computers and/or handheld devices.

More than 70 ABA members have now migrated their store websites to Drupal, the new ABA IndieCommerce platform, with 24 launching since early August.

On Tuesday, August 25, Sony announced that it is cooperating with the American Booksellers Association, other retailers, and a variety of traditional and digital publishers to make available a universe of reading material in EPUB format compatible with Sony Readers. Among the sites offering EPUB content for sale to consumers will be more than 200 independent bookstores participating in ABA's IndieCommerce program.

This week, ABA IndieCommerce announced a deadline extension for stores that have not yet received training on the migration of their sites to the new Drupal platform. The migration deadline for those stores is now November 1; however, booksellers who have received training before July 17 will still be required to migrate their websites to the new platform by September 1.

In 2004, Google announced that it had entered into agreements with the New York Public Library and the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford to digitize books in their collections to form a searchable electronic database that would allow users to see snippets or a few lines from the scanned books.

ABA IndieCommerce's new Drupal platform, recently launched features such as wholesaler fulfillment, and the upcoming debut of an easy-to-use e-book functionality all drew the interest of booksellers at BookExpo America.

This week, the American Booksellers Association unveils a new name, and a new logo, for the ABA E-Commerce Solution: IndieCommerce.

The IndieBound.org Affiliate Program is unique in that it links to not one, but hundreds of independent bookstore websites. And this week the program, which pays generous commissions to bloggers, authors, and other website owners on sales their sites refer to independent bookstores, launched the first of several planned enhancements.

Training sessions to guide booksellers through the migration of their ABA E-Commerce Solution websites to Drupal, the new, open-source system, are now underway. ABA staff has created a new, albeit empty, website for each store and is providing instructions on how to create an account at the new site and more.

On April 1, the American Booksellers Association transferred co-op management for booksellers participating in the ABA E-Commerce Solution to Paz & Associates. Mark Kaufman, who currently serves as co-op administrator for 30 independent booksellers using Paz's newsletter marketing services, is now working with E-commerce stores to claim publishers' co-op monies to help offset the cost of maintaining their websites.

This week, the ABA E-Commerce Solution announced that Drupal training sessions had begun and some stores have already successfully migrated over to the new, open-source system.

Presented to the ABA Board of Directors at its March 2009 Meeting

By Len Vlahos, ABA Chief Program Officer

History

In 1978 Douglas Adams envisioned a slim electronic folio that contained all the useful knowledge of all the people on all the planets in the universe. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as Adams imagined it, would let you carry in your pocket a device that functioned like an amalgam of Google and an e-book. And while he was trying to be funny, Adams, it turns out, was prescient.