Technology

Last week, in a series of meetings arranged by the American Booksellers Association, U.S. publishers and wholesalers had the opportunity to learn about batch.co.uk, a service of the Booksellers Association of the United Kingdom and Ireland, that is designed to help reduce overhead in the supply chain by providing a single, consolidated payment solution.

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) recently announced that it had received several reports of books carrying a Bookland EAN bar code with an erroneous number encoded in the bar code and displayed below the bar code itself. "The erroneous number begins with '979', an invalid prefix for today's Bookland EAN and an ISBN range not yet activated by International or National ISBN Agencies," said the BISG statement. "The erroneous number is unlikely to be recognized by the computer systems of many booksellers who are not yet prepared for ISBN-13.

Book Sense and Earthcomber, a mobile marketing service that matches people on the go with their personal interests, have partnered to offer the directory of Book Sense store locations in a mobile GPS-enabled format for Palm OS and Windows Mobile PDAs and smart phones.

On April 3, a partnership of six nonprofit publishers, the nation's largest book wholesaler, and a group of independent and chain bookstores, announced a plan to provide book lovers with an on-demand choice in format, similar to those available to consumers of music, film, and television.

By Peter Osnos, Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation

The book is an eternal artifact of civilization. Sacred texts. Classics by a crackling fire; a great story; a library lined with the handsome bindings of favorites; a bookstore where browsing is a joy of reminiscence and discovery.

Through a new partnership between the American Booksellers Association and Above the Treeline (ATL), ABA member booksellers can now subscribe to ATL's online software product -- designed to help bookstores improve finances by optimizing inventory selection -- at a discounted rate and without the initial set-up fee.

This week, the American Booksellers Association announced a new partnership with Above the Treeline, LLC, which provides an online software product designed to help bookstores improve finances by optimizing inventory selection.

This week, Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colorado, in partnership with BurstMarketing, launched a free, weekly podcast show, Authors on Tour -- Live, on the web at www.authorsontourlive.com. The podcasts feature recently published authors reading from and discussing their books at events at one of Tattered Cover's three locations. Each show is approximately 30 to 45 minutes.

By Fred Hoffman

While it might not be as well-publicized as "Y2K," a potentially very serious computer systems problem looms on the horizon for some book retailers: In the near future, the book community will run out of unique 10-digit ISBNs, and, to ward off the possible repetition of ISBN numbers, there is a transition currently underway from a 10-digit ISBN to an ISBN- or EAN-13 identifier.

Partnership With BookstreamInc. to Bring More Content to Independent Bookstore Web Sites

In the time you may spend browsing in a bookstore for the right book, you can now publish one of your own. With advances in Print-On-Demand (POD) technology, the equipment is easy, fast, and small enough to operate in a 5,000-square-foot bookstore.

It may not be as sexy as Y2K, but it has the same potential to cause chaos for booksellers, publishers, and vendors if their inventory management and POS systems are not ready for the major evolution that will take place in the unique identifiers for books as well as other products sold in the North American market in the next few years. Most notable among the changes, the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) will expand to 13 digits from 10 digits, effective January 1, 2007.

On January 29, Ingram Book Group unveiled "pubsource," a new enhancement to its "ipage" Web site that provides booksellers with the ability to check availability and purchase book products directly from three participating publishers: Random House, Holtzbrinck Publishers Group, and HarperCollins.

ABA Marketing Director Jill Perlstein provides booksellers with her impressions of the National Retail Federation's (NRF) 92nd Annual Convention & Expo, which was held on January 12 - 15 at New York City's Jacob Javits Convention Center.

The past few months have turned out to be quite volatile for the eBook industry. In June, Gemstar-TV Guide International decided to drop out of the eBook business. This was followed by PalmGear's acquisition of Palm Digital Media, which produces eBook reading software and is an eBook supplier, and, then, Barnesandnoble.com dropped a bombshell in September when it announced that it would no longer carry eBooks.