IndieCommerce

In the past two weeks, 11 more ABA IndieCommerce sites have gone live on the program's new Drupal platform, which is earning high marks from booksellers and bringing an overall increase in traffic to ABA member sites.

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.

Since migrating to the new, open-source Drupal platform, 84 ABA IndieCommerce sites are experiencing greater stability and better performance. The overall result has been an increase in both traffic and sales for migrated sites. In addition, the IndieCommerce program as a whole has reached a tipping point: more consumer traffic is now going to the sites on Drupal than to the sites that have yet to migrate.

On September 24, the American Booksellers Association wrote to the Arizona Department of Revenue to point out, once again, that Amazon.com's distribution facilities in Phoenix and Goodyear, Arizona, constitute a physical presence in the state and require the online giant to collect and remit sales tax for purchases made by Arizona residents.

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.

More than 70 ABA members have now migrated their store websites to Drupal, the new ABA IndieCommerce platform, with 24 launching since early August.

On Tuesday, August 25, Sony announced that it is cooperating with the American Booksellers Association, other retailers, and a variety of traditional and digital publishers to make available a universe of reading material in EPUB format compatible with Sony Readers. Among the sites offering EPUB content for sale to consumers will be more than 200 independent bookstores participating in ABA's IndieCommerce program.

This week, ABA IndieCommerce announced a deadline extension for stores that have not yet received training on the migration of their sites to the new Drupal platform. The migration deadline for those stores is now November 1; however, booksellers who have received training before July 17 will still be required to migrate their websites to the new platform by September 1.

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.

ABA IndieCommerce's new Drupal platform, recently launched features such as wholesaler fulfillment, and the upcoming debut of an easy-to-use e-book functionality all drew the interest of booksellers at BookExpo America.