E-commerce

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.

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 Tuesday, June 22, the on-sale date for former President Bill Clinton's My Life (Knopf), BookSense.com announced that it had made available to BookSense.com participants an audio clip and chapter excerpt from the book.

Here is the latest news and an update on improvements from BookSense.com.

On May 26, BookSense.com sent an important e-mail to members in which it discussed the new inventory upload price reduction, new enhancements, BEA reminders, and fraudulent order vigilance.

Rather than hope customers will use and/or buy from their Web sites when they can't get to the bookstore, some booksellers have decided to bring their BookSense.com Web sites to customers by creating Web kiosks in their stores. Booksellers who spoke to BTW about their kiosks have found the axiom made famous in W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe on target: Build it, and they will come.

On January 29, Chief Judge J. Gavan Murtha of the U.S. District Court in Brattleboro, Vermont, issued a judgment and order that permanently enjoined a Vermont Internet law that would have prohibited the distribution on the Internet of non-obscene sexually explicit materials that are defined as "harmful to minors" if these materials could be accessed by persons under 18. The plaintiffs had claimed that the law violated constitutionally protected free speech rights and the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Here, BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos provides an update on the latest improvements and enhancements to BookSense.com.

Greetings BookSense.com Bookseller! There's a lot of BookSense.com news in this edition of On the Move:

BookSense.com has announced that Houghton Mifflin will join the BookSense.com Co-op Reimbursement Program starting this January. "We're participating in the BookSense.com co-op program to support Book Sense and to be supportive of every new program it offers -- and to be one of the early birds," said Houghton Mifflin's Carla Gray. "It's a great way to get titles onto booksellers' Web sites and displayed in their stores."

According to reports released by Forrester and the National Retail Federation (NRF), this holiday season is looking to be a good one for retailers. But the jolliest retailers of all may be those traditional stores that also offer their customers a retail Web site, a recent BusinessWeek article reported. More and more, multichannel operators are learning that online stores can spur the performance of their bricks-and-mortar outlets.