Technology

Above the Treeline has launched Serendipity, a new service that enables small publishers to use the features of its Edelweiss digital catalog product.

Google announced last week that it has expanded the features available to small businesses through its Google Places service. The changes give business owners the opportunity to provide more information to consumers through Google's Local Search results.

Daniel Clancy, director of Google Books, offered a keynote presentation at the Winter Institute's Technology Day that provided booksellers with insights into plans for Google Editions, launching later this year, as well as a deeper understanding of the challenges of the e-book marketplace.

Daniel Clancy, director of Google Books, will be the keynote lunch speaker at the Winter Institute's Technology Day, on Wednesday, February 3. Clancy, who has given tech talks at a variety of venues, including South by Southwest and Stanford University, will discuss the soon-to-be-launched Google Editions and diversity in the e-book marketplace.

This week, the American Booksellers Association presented IndieCommerce members with a roadmap of upgrades and new features planned for the first half of 2010. ABA also assured members that, in the wake of the staff reorganization announced last week, IndieCommerce remains an extremely high priority and that the recent changes would put staff in a stronger position to respond to customer service questions and to implement new features.

ABA IndieCommerce this week launched a new feature that allows stores to create new orders on their customers' behalf and charge their credit cards automatically using a secure, encrypted feature called a Customer Information Manager (CIM) Profile.

A CIM Profile is an encrypted data snapshot of a customer's credit card info.

How might you use this feature?

Plans to make Sony eReaders available for purchase from independent bookstores in time for this holiday season will not come to fruition despite the best efforts of the American Booksellers Association and others in the book industry. Work is ongoing, however, to provide indie booksellers with the ability to sell eReaders sometime in the future.

By Len Vlahos, ABA Chief Operating Officer

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." --Wayne Gretzky

O'Reilly Media, Inc., is offering ABA members a 25 percent discount on its upcoming, online Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. The conference will be held online on Thursday, October 8, from noon to 3:20 p.m. EDT.

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.

In the three-plus years since Eric Wilska of The Bookloft in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Susan Novotny of The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, New York, founded The Troy Book Makers, the print-on-demand service has "never not grown each month," said Wilska.

One could, if one wished, explain away David Taylor's enthusiasm for print-on-demand technology simply by noting that it's part of his job; he is, after all, president of Ingram's Lightning Source, a global provider of on-demand and distribution solutions for the publishing industry.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) confirmed last week that it has launched an investigation to determine whether the settlement of copyright infringement lawsuits brought against Google by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) violates the Sherman Antitrust Act.

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.