News - Regional

By Stacy Mitchell

The first Pacific Northwest Independent Bestseller List, published in a cooperative effort between Book Sense and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA), is making its debut this week. The PNBA list is the third regional Book Sense bestseller list, joining lists published in conjunction with the New England Booksellers Association and Southeast Booksellers Association.

Linda Ramsdell, owner of the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vermont, is hanging up her bookseller’s hat for a few days and donning both author escort and limo driver’s caps to add a new dimension to New England handselling. The author Ramsdell will escort, from June 30 to July 3, is Michael Crummey (Book Sense 76 Pick River Thieves, Houghton Mifflin), and the limo is her Subaru Impreza.

On June 20, the owners and managers of nine American Booksellers Association member stores in Iowa mailed a letter to Governor Tom Vilsack and Iowa’s Information Technology Department (ITD) expressing their concern over an exclusive Amazon.com link on the official state Web site, www.iowa.gov.

The fall trade show season will begin with the Mid-South Booksellers Association show, to be held on September 5 - 8 in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the weeks following, there will be nine more shows, and Bookselling This Week will provide complete pre- and post-show coverage for all of them. Look for BTW’s pre-show coverage to begin in mid-July. Here is a list of the fall shows:

By Scott Foley

The Southeast Booksellers Association (SEBA) recently announced the winners of the SEBA Book Awards. The winners of the 2002 awards will be honored at the "Rep Appreciation, Book Awards, and More Celebration" at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida on Thursday, September 19. The Awards are given to recognize the year's best books either by a Southern author or set in the South. This year’s winners are:

The Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association (MPBA) has announced the winners of the association's 2002 Regional Book Awards, which are presented annually "to honor outstanding books set in our region that were published in the prior year." The 2002 Regional Book Award winners are:

An average 11 percent square-footage increase in 2001 to New England Booksellers Association stores can be interpreted several ways, but, as executive director Rusty Drugan said of the latest survey, "This expansion does speak to the fact that business may be better. And it certainly speaks to the confidence of the store owners."

When booksellers from Kansas to Louisiana and all points in between travel hundreds of miles in the middle of the week to meet for three hours in Dallas, they want to accomplish a lot. And they did on April 10 in Dallas -- according to a number of booksellers who attended both an ABA Booksellers Forum and bookseller programming, which was sponsored by the Mid-South Independent Booksellers Association (MSIBA). Both events were hosted by The Enchanted Forest Bookstore.