Industry News

Over the past decade, as the bookstore market has become increasingly competitive, many independent bookstores began to delve into sidelines in an effort to broaden their stores' appeal and to enhance their bottom line. For many booksellers, that meant bringing in CDs and, more recently, DVDs.

Last week, BTW spoke to a number of booksellers about their reasons for carrying CDs, DVDs, or both, as well as how they handle security.

Although the formal presentation to Congress of thousands of Campaign for Reader Privacy petitions took place on September 29, bookstores that still have signed petitions should send them to the American Booksellers Association. "We'll be doing a supplementary presentation to Congress" said ABA COO Oren Teicher, "so, even after the deadline, if bookstores still have signed petitions, they should send in what they've got.

This past June, when Patricia Worth, and her husband, Gary, who works as a graphic designer, opened River Reader Books in Lexington, Missouri, Patricia left a 16-year career as a contractor to become a full-time bookseller, and, since the new bookstore has a cafe, a barista, too. "No sense in learning one new trade when you can learn three or four," she joked.

On Wednesday, October 13, the 20 finalists for the 2004 National Book Awards were announced by Garrison Keillor at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. The winners in each of four categories -- Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature -- will be announced on November 17 at a ceremony at the Marriott Marquis in New York City to be hosted by Keillor. Each winner will receive $10,000 and a bronze statue; each finalist will receive a $1,000 cash award and a bronze medal.

The finalists are:

"Bookstore Tourism," a term copyrighted by Larry Portzline, is a grassroots effort to promote and support independent bookstores by marketing them as tourist destinations and thereby creating a new travel niche for book lovers.

On Thursday, October 21, Common Cause of Delaware, a nonprofit citizens lobbying organization dedicated to government reform and accountability, will hold a citizen's public meeting on the Safety and Freedom Ensured Act (S. 1709, SAFE Act) at Ninth Street Book Store in Wilmington, Delaware. The SAFE Act looks to amend provisions of the USA Patriot Act, including Section 215, which gives law enforcement officials broad authority to demand that libraries or bookstores turn over books, records, papers, and documents.

On Tuesday, October 5, Florida's Tampa Tribune published an editorial entitled "The Patriot Act's License to Snoop Causes Unjustified Anxiety " that began by stating, "Fears that the Patriot Act allows government agents to spy on everyone's library records are wildly overblown. All the three-year-old law does is open a variety of semiprivate files to scrutiny by agents conducting espionage investigations.