Winter Institute

Bookstore and provisional members are now registering for the American Booksellers Association's Fifth Winter Institute (Wi5), to be held from Wednesday through Friday, February 3 - 5, 2010, in San Jose, California. Registration, which opened on September 3, is capped at 500 and is being filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Registration for the American Booksellers Association's Fifth Winter Institute (Wi5), to be held from Wednesday through Friday, February 3 - 5, 2010, in San Jose, California, began last week. The annual education event, exclusively for ABA bookstore and provisional members, is sponsored by Ingram Book Company/Ingram Publisher Services.

Registration opens today for the American Booksellers Association's Fifth Annual Winter Institute (Wi5), to be held from Wednesday, February 3, through Friday, February 5, 2010, at the Doubletree San Jose in San Jose, California. The education event, sponsored by Ingram Book Company/Ingram Publisher Services, is open exclusively to ABA bookstore and provisional members.

The American Booksellers Association has announced the establishment of the Avin Mark Domnitz Scholarship to the Fifth Annual Winter Institute to honor the former ABA CEO's wide-ranging contributions to independent bookselling.

Susan Richmond of Inklings Bookshop in Yakima, Washington, knows a good idea when she hears it.

A video of Stacy Mitchell's presentation, "How Shop Local Movements Are Saving Small Businesses," at the Pre-Winter Institute Conference on Local First/Shop Local Initiatives is now available via BookWeb.org.

Over the past holiday season, several independent bookstores paired with other indie retailers in their communities for holiday coupon promotions. While the results of these inaugural efforts did not result in a pronounced sales increase, valuable lessons were learned, the stores garnered positive PR among customers, and those who participated believe that, with some adjustments, cross-promotions are initiatives whose time has come.

In November 2008, as the economic downturn started to spread across the retail landscape, American Booksellers Association staff attempted to contact every member bookstore. This effort was undertaken to offer ABA's help in any way possible and to assess how members were doing. As they provided status reports, however, booksellers also offered valuable insights into their unique ways of countering declining sales.

Booksellers who missed the popular ABA Winter Institute program "Using Multimedia to Market Your Store" -- which Tova Beiser of Brown University Bookstore described as full of ideas that "seem really cool and worth doing" -- can find something of a recap in a downloadable PDF create

A highlight of ABA's January 29 pre-Winter Institute Conference on Local First/Shop Local Initiatives was the stirring lunchtime speech of author Terry Tempest Williams, who moved booksellers to tears and elicited rousing ovations. With Williams' permission, BTW is happy to present the full text of her address here.