ABA Task Force Provides Guidance on Electronic Catalogs

The American Booksellers Association's efforts to ensure that publishers that are developing electronic catalogs are making them as useful as possible for independent booksellers continued this past weekend. On Friday and Saturday, August 22 and 23, ABA's Electronic Catalog Task Force met at the Doubletree Hotel at the San Francisco Airport to get bookseller input and to fine-tune recommendations that ABA Board members and staff will discuss with publishers at a series of meetings in conjunction with the Board's mid-September meeting in New York.

"We're grateful for the contributions of the 10 booksellers who participated in the task force and to HarperCollins' Kathy Smith, who all came together in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration to offer the Board guidance for its discussions with publishers this fall," said ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz. "The task force's recommendations, which we'll share with interested publishers, will help the book industry move forward on e-catalogs in a way that will be beneficial for both booksellers and publishers."

Smith, HarperCollins' senior vice president, sales administration, was at the meeting to provide task force members with an update on the publisher's development of an interactive, online sales catalog, which was announced during this year's BookExpo America.

Booksellers serving on the ABA task force were Joe Foster of Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colorado; Carole Horne of Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Arsen Kashkashian of Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colorado; Barry Rossnick of Books Inc. in San Francisco; Ty Wilson of Copperfield's Books in Healdsburg, California; Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco; ABA President Gayle Shanks of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona; ABA Vice President Michael Tucker of Books Inc. in San Francisco; and Board members Cathy Langer of Tattered Cover in Denver and Ken White of SFSU Bookstore in San Francisco. In addition to Domnitz, ABA staff at the meeting included Senior Director of Publisher Initiatives Mark Nichols and Education Coordinator Jamie Rogers.

At each of the meetings planned for September 23, three Board members and ABA staff will meet with publisher representatives to discuss the task force's recommendations. Participating publishers will be Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Macmillan, New York University Press, Penguin Group, Perseus Books Group, Random House, and Simon & Schuster.