Carin Siegfried, the Baker & Taylor rep for New England and upstate New York, writes:

In the last month or so, I know of three stores hit by those perennial scam artists who call using the TDD operator or e-mail, asking for large quantities of expensive books, using a stolen credit card that initially goes through but later is charged back. These scam artists have gotten smarter, no longer ordering hundreds of bibles but instead ordering 20-30 copies each of three or four different textbook titles. They refuse to give out their phone numbers, and their name does not match the name on the card (which of course one can't determine over the phone or Internet without a call to the credit card company).

Fortunately the three stores caught the scam before shipping out the books, but one had paid for next-day delivery from our West Coast warehouse on some very heavy books and was out a small fortune on freight costs. Two of the booksellers are fairly new store owners, so they hadn't read articles on this topic.

Perhaps you could alert Shelf Awareness readers to this problem and remind people to be on the lookout and know that if it sounds too good to be true, you should be wary.

[Editors' Note: Done!]

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Half Price Books, which buys and sells new and used books, magazines, comics, records, CDs, DVDs and collectible items, is opening two more stores today, in Palatine and Bloomingdale, Ill., its second and third stores in the Chicago area and its 87th and 88th stores nationwide.

The 9,600-sq.-ft. Palatine store is in Park Place Shopping Center; the 12,700-sq.-ft. Bloomingdale store is in Bloomingdale Court Shopping Center.

"Our stores are unique in that we offer a different inventory than other major retail bookstores," president and CEO Sharon Anderson Wright said in a statement. "There will be something different every time you come in, and since consumers can sell their books directly to us, many items aren't available in other bookstores."

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A fake genetics company called Nextgencode, featured in videos on YouTube and other Web sites, aims to promote Michael Crichton's next book, Next (HarperCollins, $27.95, 0060872985), which appears November 28, according to today's Wall Street Journal. Viewers who "follow the videos' directions and go to the Nextgencode Web site" and then click on "new book reveals trade secrets" discover a picture of Next.

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Sandra Dear has been promoted to v-p of group company, custom and proprietary sales at Penguin. She was formerly v-p of merchandising, warehouse clubs. Before joining Penguin a year ago, Dear worked at AMS for 10 years and was a buyer at Penney.

Barbara O'Shea, president of non trade sales at Penguin Group, said that since arriving at Penguin, Dear "has increased our business in just about every account where we sell custom product and she has already brought new customers to the table." She will continue to use the backlist of Penguin Group and its U.K. and Australian sister companies "to produce unique product in a wide variety of new formats."
 

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• Consumers will spend $132 billion online this year, up 19% from $111 billion last year (JupiterResearch)
• The share of online spending that goes to Web-only retailers is 52% this year, down from 55% last year and 60% in 2004 (Majestic Research Corp.)
• Some 41% of Internet shoppers in the U.S. made their first online purchase in the past four years (Forrester Research)

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• Adult paperback, up 26.8%, to $172.3 million
• Children's/YA paperback, up 10.9%, to $53.8 million
• Higher education, up 10.1%, $244.9 million

• Adult mass market, down 8.1%, to $79 million
• Children's/YA hardcover, down 4.6%, to $100.6 million
• Adult hardcover, down 1.4%, to $192.5 million

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Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's Web site.

Saturday, November 18

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In this segment first aired in 1993, Tom Wheeler, president and CEO of Shiloh Group, a telecommunications development and investment company, talked about his book Take Command!: Leadership Lessons from the Civil War (Currency, 0385495196).

9 p.m. After Words. Martin Walker, senior fellow at Woodrow Wilson Center and editor emeritus for United Press International, interviews John O'Sullivan, veteran journalist, former special adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, editor at large for the National Review, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World (Regnery, $27.95, 1596980168), an exploration of the roles played by President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Thatcher in the fall of the Soviet Union. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

10 p.m. General Assignment. The 2006 National Book Awards ceremony, held last night. (Re-airs Sunday at 7 p.m.)

Sunday, November 19

12 a.m. Public Lives. During an event held at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., David Cannadine discussed Mellon: An American Life (Knopf, $35, 0679450327), his biography of financier Andrew Mellon, who served as Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Great Britain and founded the National Gallery of Art.

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• Fiction: Richard Powers for The Echo Maker (FSG)
• Nonfiction: Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)
• Young People's Literature: M.T. Anderson for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (Candlewick)
• Poetry: Nathaniel Mackey for Splay Anthem (New Directions)

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Yesterday we spoke with Len Vlahos, director of Booksense.com, about the present, and future, role of bookstore Web sites, as well as the relative merits of Booksense.com Web sites in particular. This time we ask him about the dark side.

Robert Gray: What are the disadvantages in using Booksense.com?

Len Vlahos: There are no disadvantages! Just kidding.
 
The product is templated, so of course the look and feel is somewhat restrictive in that booksellers must work within the framework of the template. We did add a new template at BEA this year, so we now have two main families of templates (each with multiple color choices and backgrounds). Here's an example of each: Fountain Bookstore and Village Books.

That said, there is a non-templated solution we refer to as a "self-authored site" or SAS. In this case a bookseller develops, maintains and hosts the front-end and integrates our back-end tools--database, search engine, shopping cart, etc. Here are a few examples of stores using an SAS solution: Cody's Books, Joseph-Beth Booksellers and Elliott Bay Book Co.

In addition to being templated, another current shortcoming is that we don't yet handle non-book product (DVD, music, toys, used books, apparel, etc.) in any significant way. However, in preparing for the ISBN-13, we're well positioned to add non-book modules in the future. It's on our development to-do list, but we don't yet have an ETA.
 
RG: Some bookstores have been loyal BookSense.com stores for a long time. Others have been with you for a period and then left. Still others opted from the outset to use alternatives to build and sustain their Web sites. Having observed these patterns and talked to your clients for some time now, do you have a sense of why booksellers stay with you, leave or never join in the first place?
 
LV: I think the booksellers who STAY with us do so for a few reasons:
 
a. The product is very good for the price. It provides a way for booksellers to promote their stores, promote their events and allow their customers to search for and buy books. This is all available at below-market cost. If a bookseller were to try to build a comparable system on their own, it would be much more expensive. (As noted earlier, having a presence online--BookSense.com or otherwise--is becoming a reality and requirement of 21st century retailing.)
 
b. We're continually improving and upgrading the product in response to user requests. We spend a lot of time talking with, and, more important, listening to our users. Most of the innovation and technical change in the BookSense.com product has been the direct result of bookseller feedback. We hold a users group meeting at BEA every year, and we convene the BookSense.com Users Council (a group of volunteer booksellers providing advice and feedback) at least once a year.
 
c. Our customer service is excellent. Our team is very quick and thorough in responding to member questions and concerns.

Most often members LEAVE the program because they perceive the cost to be high: BookSense.com costs $225 a month ($245 if you're uploading your inventory), and we know that's not an insignificant sum, particularly for smaller-volume stores. Some of those stores come to the program with an expectation that they're going to pay for their Web site directly through online sales. When that happens, it's the exception, not the rule. We try help our members understand that the Web site is at least as much a marketing tool as it is a sales tool, and not to enter this arena with unrealistic expectations. In addition, we know that a lot of transactions that may start online (with a book search or event list), are completed in the bricks-and-mortar store.
 
As to why booksellers NEVER join at all, there are probably a few reasons. First, you need to be an ABA member, a storefront retailer and a participant in the Book Sense marketing program. I also think the notion of having to manage a Web site can seem overwhelming. There are only so many hours in the day and we definitely appreciate how many of those hours are quickly filled with the myriad tasks facing booksellers. (A lot of us, myself included, are former booksellers.) What we've tried to do with BookSense.com is make the management of a site as simple as possible, hopefully shrinking the demand on a bookseller's time, but that message is not always easy to communicate.
 
RG: Many booksellers who tell me they became disenchanted with the service cite the monthly fees versus online sales as a prime reason for leaving. Were their expectations unreasonable? What can or should an indie expect from a BookSense.com site as far as selling titles online is concerned? And if they aren't selling books, what do you tell them to convince them to stay with the plan?
 
LV: I think I've answered the money/sales questions, but would like to make two other quick points here:
 
a. ABA doesn't try to "convince" members to stay with the program if it's clearly not to the benefit of the member. We're a not-for-profit association, and our mission is to promote and protect the interests of our independent bookstore members. If BookSense.com isn't working as a solution, we advise our members to drop it, and have, on occasion steered them toward other solutions.
 
b. That said, it's hard to evaluate the success or failure of a Web site (as either a marketing or sales tool) if that site hasn't been properly promoted, so we do encourage our members to market their Web sites adequately. Often I find myself in a great bookstore with a great Web site (BookSense.com or otherwise) and see no evidence that a Web site exists. We've been preaching this message at our educational sessions, and I think it's starting to take root; I'm hearing of more stores including the store's URL on store signs, window posters, etc.

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In Part 3, we'll discuss the Booksense.com search engine and Len Vlahos will share examples of some of his favorite bookstore variations on the Booksense.com theme.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

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