Technology

Through a new partnership between the American Booksellers Association and Above the Treeline (ATL), ABA member booksellers can now subscribe to ATL's online software product -- designed to help bookstores improve finances by optimizing inventory selection -- at a discounted rate and without the initial set-up fee.

This week, the American Booksellers Association announced a new partnership with Above the Treeline, LLC, which provides an online software product designed to help bookstores improve finances by optimizing inventory selection.

This week, Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colorado, in partnership with BurstMarketing, launched a free, weekly podcast show, Authors on Tour -- Live, on the web at www.authorsontourlive.com. The podcasts feature recently published authors reading from and discussing their books at events at one of Tattered Cover's three locations. Each show is approximately 30 to 45 minutes.

By Fred Hoffman While it might not be as well-publicized as "Y2K," a potentially very serious computer systems problem looms on the horizon for some book retailers: In the near future, the book community will run out of unique 10-digit ISBNs, and, to ward off the possible repetition of ISBN numbers, there is a transition currently underway from a 10-digit ISBN to an ISBN- or EAN-13 identifier.

Partnership With BookstreamInc. to Bring More Content to Independent Bookstore Web Sites

In the time you may spend browsing in a bookstore for the right book, you can now publish one of your own. With advances in Print-On-Demand (POD) technology, the equipment is easy, fast, and small enough to operate in a 5,000-square-foot bookstore.

It may not be as sexy as Y2K, but it has the same potential to cause chaos for booksellers, publishers, and vendors if their inventory management and POS systems are not ready for the major evolution that will take place in the unique identifiers for books as well as other products sold in the North American market in the next few years. Most notable among the changes, the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) will expand to 13 digits from 10 digits, effective January 1, 2007.

On January 29, Ingram Book Group unveiled "pubsource," a new enhancement to its "ipage" Web site that provides booksellers with the ability to check availability and purchase book products directly from three participating publishers: Random House, Holtzbrinck Publishers Group, and HarperCollins.

ABA Marketing Director Jill Perlstein provides booksellers with her impressions of the National Retail Federation's (NRF) 92nd Annual Convention & Expo, which was held on January 12 - 15 at New York City's Jacob Javits Convention Center.

The past few months have turned out to be quite volatile for the eBook industry. In June, Gemstar-TV Guide International decided to drop out of the eBook business. This was followed by PalmGear's acquisition of Palm Digital Media, which produces eBook reading software and is an eBook supplier, and, then, Barnesandnoble.com dropped a bombshell in September when it announced that it would no longer carry eBooks.