Industry News

From sea to shining sea and back again defines former President Bill Clinton's trajectory for one of the best-attended and best-publicized book tours in history. Neither the excitement nor the crowds have diminished since Clinton started the book signing tour for his memoir, My Life (Knopf), on June 22 in New York City.

Due to the Fourth of July holiday next week, booksellers using the ABA file upload method or the manual entry method have until 3:00 a.m. EST on Wednesday, July 7, to report to the Book Sense Bestseller Lists. For stores reporting through Nielsen BookScan, the reporting deadline is 11:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, July 6.

The Book Sense Bestseller Lists will be published and distributed during the afternoon of Wednesday, July 7.

There is still time to nominate titles for three upcoming Book Sense Picks lists: the September Book Sense Picks, Fall Children's Book Sense Picks, and the Banned Books Top Ten. The deadline for nominations for all three lists is Friday, July 9.

The City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, North Carolina, takes its name from the same source as San Francisco's City Lights -- the eponymous Charlie Chaplin movie. But instead of a city of 800,000 on the bay, Sylva's City Lights is in a rural town of 2,500 between the Great Smokies and the Balsams, two mountain ranges in the highest part of the southern Appalachians. And rather than beat poetry, owner Joyce Moore made the store's specialty the literature of the Appalachian region.

After a long and valiant battle, Ruminator Books of St. Paul, Minnesota, has come to the end of its existence. Owner and founder David Unowsky, a venerable voice for independent bookselling, has tilted at his last windmill: He plans to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy this week -- liquidating the business rather than reorganizing it. Unowsky told BTW that the final blow came when the store's landlord, Macalester College, withdrew from negotiations.

On Tuesday, June 29, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld a lower court ruling barring enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) and remanded the case back to District Court. A broad group of plaintiffs -- including the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco and West Hollywood, City Lights in San Francisco, and Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon -- hailed the decision as a victory for the First Amendment.

Lonely Planet, the independent travel publisher, wrapped up its mega-tour of over 100 independent bookstores on June 3, disembarking at BookExpo America at Chicago's McCormick Place. The Lonely Planet crew spent one month aboard the Lonely Planet RV, which sported side panels advertising the "Lonely Planet 2004 Independent Bookstore Road Trip." They visited stores throughout the eastern half of the U.S. and traveled over 5,500 miles. As the tour T-shirt said: "26 States, 27 Days, 5,504 Miles, 116 Independent Bookstores."

The downloadable PDF flier of July "We Also Recommend" titles, which includes bibliographic information, jacket images, and booksellers' quotations, is now available (click here). Titles on the July Book Sense Picks fliers, which were sent to stores with Book Sense in the June Red Box, can be reviewed at news.bookweb.org/read/2648.

Joseph-Beth to Open Its Eighth Store

The July 5 issue of The New Yorker, on sale June 28, features a special insert, "Book Sensibility: Celebrating the Fifth Anniversary of Book Sense." The insert is an ode to the uniqueness and rich character of independent booksellers, their importance to the book industry, and of course, Book Sense. Preceding and following the insert are full-page Book Sense ads.

BookSense.com is now offering Book Sense marketing program members the chance to launch their own BookSense.com Web site -- free of charge, with no obligation to continue after the free trial ends. The BookSense.com Free Trial Offer, which began June 1 and runs through September 30, 2004, offers booksellers a chance to test this valuable online sales and marketing tool.

On the first day of summer, National Public Radio's special correspondent Susan Stamberg turned to three independent booksellers for their top picks for "best beach reads." Stamberg, who regularly devotes segments to interviews with independent booksellers around the country, hosted the Morning Edition story, "An Independent View of Summer Reading: Bookstore Owners Offer Lists of Literary Picks," which featured booksellers representing the South, Midwest, and West.