Industry News

American Booksellers Association volunteer leadership, senior staff, and representatives of the regional associations spent a busy week in meetings from January 12 to 18 in Santa Monica, California. In addition to the ABA Board's winter meeting, the ABA Booksellers Advisory Council (BAC), the newly constituted BookSense.com Users Council (BUC), and members of the regional booksellers associations were all involved in a number of meetings throughout the week.

In December 2002, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Bestseller List marked its fifth anniversary. Beginning next week, the list will take a new step, becoming the NCIBA/Book Sense Bestseller List. NCIBA Executive Director Hut Landon told BTW that "as the NCIBA list enters its sixth year of weekly publication, we're delighted that we have become a Book Sense regional partner."

The first two ABA Booksellers Forums of the year were recently held in California. The first was held in Santa Monica on January 14 and the second in San Francisco on January 15.

On February 6, 2003, the American Booksellers Association, in conjunction with the Great Lakes Booksellers Association (GLBA), will be holding a Booksellers Forum at Weber's Inn in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

For the second time this season, Sidewalk Books, a fictitious bookstore with Book Sense, will appear in a new episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, which airs on Monday nights on CBS.

On Tuesday, January 21, almost all of the approximately 200 Austin, Texas, city residents at a community forum gave a proposed development that would bring Borders Books & Music to downtown Austin a resounding thumbs down, as reported by the Austin American-Statesman.

In The Great Good Place (Marlowe & Co.), sociologist Ray Oldenburg writes that a community's social vitality hinges upon having a gathering place where people can meet and exchange ideas -- a place that satisfies America's quest for community. He refers to this as the "third place." It seems only fitting then, that, in Lake Forest Park store, Washington, just north of Seattle, Third Place refers to an independent bookstore -- a popular gathering place that recently opened a second, much smaller (and much different) bookstore.

By Carl Lennertz

Please check stock on these titles and display in support of the publishers who have made these national ads possible:

In The New Yorker, these January/February Top Ten picks:

January 20 issue; out January 13 - THE PASSION OF ARTEMISIA, by Susan Vreeland (Penguin, $13 paper, 0142001821)

January 27 issue; out January 20 - SAMARITAN, by Richard Price (Knopf, $25, 0375411151)

Picture thousands of New Yorkers waiting on line for hours to see what all the newspapers, critics, and advertisements are raving about. Twelve-year-old Ralph Albert Blakelock could see the queues for tickets from his Greenwich Village home, Glyn Vincent tells us in The Unknown Night: The Genius and Madness of R.A. Blakelock, An American Painter (Grove).

Here is an outline of the most recent changes to the ABA Book Buyer's Handbook online.

Publishers can update their online listings and add special offers at any time using the Publisher Editing Tools at http://handbook.bookweb.org/pubhome.jsp. Questions about access to the editing features of the Handbook online should be e-mailed to [email protected] or call (800) 637-0037, ext. 1263 or 1261.

Free speech groups, educators, parents, librarians, authors, and publishers continue to criticize New York State's Education Department, Board of Regents, and legislature, for the altered and deleted wording in literary passages on the state-mandated English Language Arts Regents Exam. In a letter dated January 6, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and many others, restated their objections.

Bookstore retail sales for November 2002 continued the downward slide begun in October. November sales of $1,173 million lagged 4.8 percent behind the $1,233 million for November of the previous year.

While not robust, overall retail sales managed to eke out a slight gain. Overall retail sales for November were $303 billion, or 1.7 percent better than the $298 billion of the previous year.

November is the 10th month in a row in which bookstore sales failed to keep up with overall retail.

Here are the top 50 of ALL bestsellers -- hardcover, paperback, and children's combined -- at America's independent bookstores from November 25 to December 29, 2002.

Of note: The top two bestsellers, both novels, summarize the independent bookstores' power to sell both the literary surprises of the year, as well as the commercial blockbusters thought to be the province of the mass merchandisers.

When Kayt and Donald L. Huttlin, Jr. purchased a house on Second Avenue in Lexington, North Carolina, one of the selling points was its close proximity to Frazier's Bookstore. Kayt Huttlin, a former librarian, had always been a book lover, so she enjoyed the idea that she could just pop into the community bookstore on a whim.

Just over six months later, Huttlin enters the store not on a whim, but with a purpose: She's one of Frazier's new owners.

The long-awaited new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by British author J.K. Rowling, is scheduled to be published on June 21, 2003, Rowling's publishers announced today. The fifth book in the bestselling series will have 38 chapters and will be over a third longer than Rowling's previous book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.