Internet Commerce

On January 29, Chief Judge J. Gavan Murtha of the U.S. District Court in Brattleboro, Vermont, issued a judgment and order that permanently enjoined a Vermont Internet law that would have prohibited the distribution on the Internet of non-obscene sexually explicit materials that are defined as "harmful to minors" if these materials could be accessed by persons under 18. The plaintiffs had claimed that the law violated constitutionally protected free speech rights and the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Here, BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos provides an update on the latest improvements and enhancements to BookSense.com. Greetings BookSense.com Bookseller! There's a lot of BookSense.com news in this edition of On the Move:

BookSense.com has announced that Houghton Mifflin will join the BookSense.com Co-op Reimbursement Program starting this January. "We're participating in the BookSense.com co-op program to support Book Sense and to be supportive of every new program it offers -- and to be one of the early birds," said Houghton Mifflin's Carla Gray. "It's a great way to get titles onto booksellers' Web sites and displayed in their stores."

According to reports released by Forrester and the National Retail Federation (NRF), this holiday season is looking to be a good one for retailers. But the jolliest retailers of all may be those traditional stores that also offer their customers a retail Web site, a recent BusinessWeek article reported. More and more, multichannel operators are learning that online stores can spur the performance of their bricks-and-mortar outlets.

Here, BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos provides an update on the latest improvements and enhancements to BookSense.com. Greetings! There's a lot of BookSense.com news in this edition of On the Move, as we've made more improvements to your BookSense.com site:

On Wednesday, October 15, Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY) introduced legislation (S. 1736) in the Senate that would allow states to simplify sales tax, with equal tax treatment between local merchants and remote sellers. The bill, the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Act (SSUTA), would help states begin to recover from years of budgetary shortfalls by collecting revenue lost through catalog and Internet purchases. The bill is co-sponsored by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND).

An economics study regarding online price elasticity released last spring seems to bear out what many Internet experts have thought all along regarding book pricing: the higher the price, the fewer the sales.

On Wednesday, September 10, the following e-mail announcement was sent to BookSense.com members from Len Vlahos, BookSense.com director. Greeting BookSense.com Bookseller,

Online retail book sales will nearly double over the next five years, according to "U.S. eCommerce Overview: 2003 to 2008," a report recently released by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research. Overall, the study predicted, e-commerce will experience a 19 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years, from $95.7 billion to just under $230 billion and will account for 10 percent of total U.S. retail sales by 2008.