IndieCommerce

As suburban sprawl threatens to overcome more and more communities, independent booksellers are facing battles on many fronts, from fighting proposed chain store developments in their communities to competing with online giants. It is a market landscape that is very familiar to Tom Campbell of Durham, North Carolina's The Regulator Bookshop.

BookSense.com recently announced several new features that improve and enhance the entire family of BookSense.com websites, as well as a schedule for maintenance that will result in some minor down time. Scheduled Down Time

With BookExpo America (BEA) about three weeks away, here is a look at a few BookSense.com-related happenings scheduled for the trade show -- as well as one BookSense.com housekeeping item. BookSense.com Users Group Meeting As has become tradition at BEA, BookSense.com is holding a BookSense.com Users Group Meeting on the opening morning of the trade show. The session is scheduled for Friday, May 19, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. in Room 150B at the Convention Center.

This week, BookSense.com announced the launch of a redesigned BookSense.com search engine that is expected to significantly increase the relevancy of consumers' search results. "The new search has been improved in a number of ways and will provide more consistent results in terms of speed and stability," said BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos.

BookSense.com recently announced its first group of new features for 2006, as well as other important news:

A fraudulent order scheme, which first came to the attention of the American Booksellers Association in October through a discussion on BookWeb's Idea Exchange, continues to plague booksellers from coast-to-coast, with reports coming in from booksellers spanning from the Southeast to the Pacific Northwest. The scam involves a person posing as a teacher of sewing classes who asks the bookstore to order several sewing titles for a class to be held in the area.

In an ongoing effort to improve BookSense.com and make it more bookseller and consumer friendly, its bookstore search capabilities have been consolidated and enhanced.

Here is the latest news and an update on improvements to BookSense.com.

Booksellers posting to BookWeb's Idea Exchange have reported a fraudulent order scheme that appears to have been replicated in several different cities. The scam involves a person posing as a teacher of sewing classes who asks the bookstore to order several sewing titles for a class to be held in the area. The "teacher" then promises to tell students to buy the book at the store in question.

BookSense.com technical staff will be performing planned maintenance on the site this Sunday, October 9, from 6:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern Time. For at least part of this time, and possibly all of it, BookSense.com stores and their customers will be unable to access store websites. Administrative pages will also be inaccessible.