BTW News Briefs

Reading Your Rights Documentary Now Available for Purchase

ABFFE has announced that Reading Your Rights, the documentary about the Tattered Cover Book Store's fight for customer privacy, is now available for purchase. The 26-minute video received rave reviews from booksellers when it was shown at several regional bookseller shows this fall.

Orders for Reading Your Rights should be sent to Henry Ansbacher, The Just Media Fund, 2195 Arapahoe St., Denver, CO 80205, and must include a check for $35 payable to The Just Media Fund.

Wired News: Consumers Ask Questions, Shop Later

According to Wired News, look for two growing trends to intensify this holiday season: consumers flocking to the Web to shop, and shoppers using it to harvest information for online or offline purchases, executives and analysts say. The first trend means it will be a very good year for online retailers, as Forrester Research expects sales to grow as much as 42 percent this season. And Wired reported that the second is "provoking intense competition among sites seeking to be the definitive source of product information -- and thus a gateway to transactions. These include Yahoo Shopping -- which recently launched a dramatic overhaul of its shopping-related areas -- and Google, as well as smaller sites such as Shopping.com, which relaunched this fall after the union of DealTime and Epinions."

Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with Jupiter Research, told Wired News this situation is fueling an intense competition and growth among sites that provide product information and tools for comparison shopping. "That's why it makes sense to have the search functionality be better and to have shopping bots [a software tool that prowls through Web sites based on the criteria specified by the user] do a better, more comprehensive job," said Evans.