News - Bookselling

The first ABA Booksellers Forum of 2002 took place at the DoubleTree Hotel in Atlanta on January 16, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. The forum was held after a busy day of ABA activities in Atlanta, which included meetings of the Strategic Planning Committee and the Governance Review Committee.

Bookstore sales in November remained resilient in the face of difficult economic conditions, registering a 5.9 percent increase over the previous November. Preliminary sales of $1,282 million for November 2001 compared favorably with the $1,211 million performance of November 2000. November bookstore sales outperformed overall retail for the same period. Preliminary overall November retail sales of $299 billion were 4.9 percent better than the $285 billion in sales recorded the previous November.

Advanced Marketing Services, Inc. (AMS) announced on, January 17, that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Publishers Group West (PGW) for a reported price of about $38 million. Under the terms of the deal, PGW founder Charlie Winton will continue to serve as company president for the next year to implement the transition. AMS -- which has built its business on supplying warehouse price clubs and other large retailers -- had revenues last year of about $700 million, as reported by the New York Times. PGW had sales of over $125 million in 2001.

By Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Poetry is in the front hall. Music in the living room. Books on books in the dining room. Science under the piano in the family room. Classics are in the little wooden bookshelf with glass-paneled doors, but only run through Aristotle before they spill over into the den. There are 4,000 books inside the house, 10,000 more in storage. Once, the pantry held cans and plates and no books. Now, the shelves are filled with pages.

Random House has begun a reorganization of its company sales group. It is the first company-wide reorganization in three years, and Ruth Liebmann, director of independent bookselling for Random House, told BTW that a major impetus for the changes is that "a lot has changed in the last three years, in the marketplace, in the needs of booksellers, and in the needs of our publishers."

For many booksellers, publisher co-operative promotions are an essential and cost-effective tool. As Dave Kaverman, co-owner of the Little Professor Book Company in Fort Wayne, Indiana, explained in a previous BTW piece last fall, utilizing publisher co-op allowances can help a store fulfill several goals at once: increasing a store's marketing exposure while also adding money to the bottom line.

A crowd estimated at between 450 and 550 packed A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco on January 11 to raise funds to help pay the legal fees of Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store, which has challenged a court order requiring it to turn over information about a customer's book purchases. The event raised $10,000 for the bookstore.

In December, Scholastic launched a marketing campaign to promote books as a source of understanding, comfort, and connection. The "Read for Life" campaign -- featuring original artwork by Harry Potter illustrator Mary Grand Pré -- is a part of a continuing outreach by Scholastic in the aftermath of September 11, and it carries the message "Read for Comfort ... Read for Closeness ...

The Bloomsbury publishing house has garnered its biggest industry headlines for signing J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter titles have been published in the U.S. by Scholastic. This week the U.K.-based publisher -- which has a U.S. publishing program distributed by Holtzbrinck -- released its first catalog of 19 children's books to be published in America.

After 12 years -- and two expansions -- the Okemos, Michigan, location of Schuler Books and Music has a new home. At 24,000 square feet, the new space (in the Greater Lansing area) is a good deal closer in size to the 20-year-old Grand Rapids Schuler Books and Music, which is 35,000 square feet.