Internet Commerce

Starting November 1, BookSense.com Co-op Reimbursement Program participants will be able to take advantage of a special offer from Algonquin Books. The publisher has created a promotion around Marlena de Blasi's A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure.

Google Launches Online Book Search Biz On Wednesday, October 6, Google announced the launch of a new search technology designed to help publishers sell books online, as reported by Reuters. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, plan to hold a press conference on Thursday, October 7, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which Reuters described as "an important showcase if the Internet search engine is to recruit the heavyweights of the book publishing industry."

Perpetrators of fraudulent order schemes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, as evidenced by the frequency and variety of scams reported by ABA member bookstores. Unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule for identifying a fraudulent order, but booksellers are being urged to err on the side of caution. Among the most easily identifiable scams are orders originating in Nigeria or another African nation for large numbers of medical books, textbooks, technical books, or bibles. A stolen credit card is usually offered as the means of payment.

A number of booksellers with BookSense.com Web sites have recently reported a new twist to the problem of fraudulent orders. In addition to orders for large numbers of Bibles and medical texts, booksellers are now seeing fraudulent orders for popular trade titles, sometimes with expedited shipping, and with domestic billing and shipping addresses.

BookSense.com has begun offering detailed traffic reports on an individual store basis. This service, which was developed in response to booksellers' requests, provides data showing how many visitors come to a bookstore's site, which pages they're visiting, when they're visiting, and much more.

On Tuesday, June 29, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld a lower court ruling barring enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) and remanded the case back to District Court. A broad group of plaintiffs -- including the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco and West Hollywood, City Lights in San Francisco, and Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon -- hailed the decision as a victory for the First Amendment.

On Tuesday, June 22, the on-sale date for former President Bill Clinton's My Life (Knopf), BookSense.com announced that it had made available to BookSense.com participants an audio clip and chapter excerpt from the book.

BookSense.com is now offering Book Sense marketing program members the chance to launch their own BookSense.com Web site -- free of charge, with no obligation to continue after the free trial ends. The BookSense.com Free Trial Offer, which began June 1 and runs through September 30, 2004, offers booksellers a chance to test this valuable online sales and marketing tool.

Here is the latest news and an update on improvements from BookSense.com. On May 26, BookSense.com sent an important e-mail to members in which it discussed the new inventory upload price reduction, new enhancements, BEA reminders, and fraudulent order vigilance.

Rather than hope customers will use and/or buy from their Web sites when they can't get to the bookstore, some booksellers have decided to bring their BookSense.com Web sites to customers by creating Web kiosks in their stores. Booksellers who spoke to BTW about their kiosks have found the axiom made famous in W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe on target: Build it, and they will come.