New Price Guide for Paperbacks Available

According to Holroyd over 40,000 paperbacks are listed, most published before 1970. The book is easy to use, indexed by publisher, author, and some of the better-known cover artists. Author pseudonyms are listed throughout.

The oversize soft cover book, an impressive 800 pages long, includes 1000 cover scans. The print is a little small, but that’s probably an elderly quibble considering the book’s overall usefulness and completeness.

The author, an experienced and long-time bookseller in Rochester, NY, specializes in science fiction, fantasy, and vintage paperbacks. The price guide took Holroyd five years to complete and he plans an update in two or three years.

Holroyd published the book himself and copies are available by contacting him at gholroyd@rochester.rr.com. Dealer terms are available. Copies are also available at a number of independent bookstores.

Holroyd, Graham & Jon Warren (intro by Richard Lupoff). Paperback Prices and Checklist. Rochester: Graham Holroyd, 2003. Soft cover. 8 1/2 X 11. $29.95

By: Martha Kelly Gutenberg Books mkelly03@rochester.rr.com 

Trade Names

“Book Miser” is a trade name that I purchased in 1993, when I entered the business. In addition to paying for inventory, a lease and furnishings, a significant amount of money was paid for the intangibles-the trade name and “goodwill,” principally. It didn’t take six months for me to learn that there was no goodwill (rather a fair amount of ill-will) connected with the business, and that the customer lists and ongoing training promised in my purchase contract would never materialize. Thus, I had paid some thousands of dollars for the right to use the name.

A year later, Interloc was born, and I joined the nascent ranks of online booksellers, using my trade name. Some time shortly thereafter, I registered the domain name “Bookmiser.com.” Nearly a decade later, the name identifies me as a user on Alibris and eBay, and as a member of the Washington Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association. My email address incorporates the name, albeit truncated to the allowable maximum 8 characters. I am associated with the name in several activities outside the world of bookselling. And, until recently, I maintained a web site under the domain name Bookmiser.com. But no more.

This past summer, we spent the month of August camping in Maine, with no internet connection. Upon my return, I realized that my web site could not be accessed. Checking with the web hosting service, I found all the files, and was able to bring each of them up directly, but the links from one file to another did not work. A phone call to my ISP revealed that I was no longer listed as the owner of this domain. In fact, the name would not come up at all on a who-is search. Thus, a phone call to Network Solutions was in order. After waiting the customary three-quarters of an hour on hold, I finally reached a live individual. This person helpfully informed me that the domain name had expired, and was now in a sort of cyber-limbo known as the Redemption Period. To bail out the name would cost $150, and if this were not done by a particular deadline, the name would be made publicly available. Since this conversation took place on September 4, and the redemption period expired at the end of the month, it was obvious that the thrifty thing to do would be wait until the first of October, and re-register the name, paying only the $30 or so it would cost then. After all, how much competition could there be for the name “Book Miser?”

As it happened, the first week of October slipped past without my attending to the renewal, and to my horror, I discovered another web site using my old domain name. Worse, they’ve put up a site that is a portal leading to a number of book-search services, in addition to non book-related links. Still worse, there are dead links, much of the rest of the site is incomprehensible and the site incorporates an “exit” function that opens a new window when you try to leave via the back-button. Worst of all, the new owners posted a copyright notice dated 2002.

I sent an e-mail to the new domain owner, asking that the copyright date be corrected, to remove any inference that I am responsible in any way for the current site. I’ve also informed the owners that I continue to use the trade name. Weeks later, there was no response, although at last check, the copyright notice is gone altogether. By all appearances, the new dot-com using my trade name is one of many identical sites parked on domain names that someone might find by accident. It’s a peculiar way of seeking business, a bit like catching fish with dynamite, in my view. The contact information for the new domain owner is murky, leading only to a couple of company names, rather than individual people.

But the most galling part is that this interloper was able to register the name on September 18, during the period it was allegedly unavailable! Now, the plot thickens.

Checking my files, I learned that Network Solutions never made contact with me about the expired registration. As it happened, the email address they had on file is one that I abandoned a year or more ago. But my mailing address and phone number were valid, and the site itself contained a mail-to link to my current email. An experiment revealed that email sent to the old address resulted in a “bounced mail” message. Under such circumstances, one would think the registrar would have tried some alternate means of reaching me, but there were no phone calls, no emails from the web site, and certainly no postal communication.

Surely, I thought, this oversight could be corrected. A colleague in the Washington Antiquarian Booksellers Association suggested that there were remedies available. A page calledwww.internic.com/faqs/udrp.html reveals that a process called the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) defines how disputes over domain-name registrations are resolved. This policy includes a procedure described as, “a mandatory, non-binding, low-cost administrative procedure to resolve a certain set of claims – namely, claims of abusive, bad faith registration.” Now, that’s pretty murky. If the procedure is mandatory, how can it be non-binding? A few paragraphs later, “domain-name disputes must generally be resolved in the same way as any other conventional dispute: by mutual agreement, court action, or voluntary arbitration. Moreover, without a court order or consent of the registrant, a registrar will not cancel, suspend, or transfer a domain name.” Since the new registrant has not responded to a polite email, that leaves arbitration or a lawsuit. The latter being out of the question, it was time to explore the arbitration process.

Three “approved dispute resolution service providers” exist (incidentally, don’t you just love this teetering stack of modifiers?) You can request review by either a single arbiter, or by a three-person panel. Of course, the fees for the three-person review are higher. The very least you would spend to initiate a review under this “low-cost” process would be $1,150. If the other party in the dispute wishes, your request for a single-person review will be shifted to a three-person panel, in which case the fees run as high as $4,500. As a bonus, you, the original complainant, get to pay half of the increased fee. Topping things off, the process can be expected to take several months. All this for non-binding arbitration-an expensive crap-shoot. Being Nobody’s Fool, I gave up and registered a new domain name: Bookmiser.US. As a precaution, I am putting META-tag keywords on each page, using “Bookmiser.com” as one of the keywords.

Here are a few things you might do to avoid what happened to me:

1. Make it your top priority to review your domain information. Not tomorrow, NOW. Go to Register.com and select a “WHOIS Lookup.” This will result in a page of information about your domain name. Check it carefully, and make any corrections needed. Make a copy of this page and store it where it can be easily retrieved.

2. Mark your calendar with the expiration date of the domain name. Better still, give yourself a heads-up about six weeks ahead of the actual date.

3. Mark your calendar with a reminder to check your WHOIS information at intervals of no more than six months.

4. Be certain to correct the domain name record any time your email or postal address changes.

5. Make a point of visiting your web site periodically, using several different browsers if possible. It’s all too easy to send files to the server by FTP and assume they will never become corrupted. Using different browsers will help you spot anything you missed in your page design that might affect the way customers see the page.

Trade name encroachment: Does It Matter?

When, as children, we played at being business-men, the name on the enterprise defined the enterprise itself. Often, the choice of a trade name is the very first step in forming a business. A trade name might reflect pride of family, the nature of the business, or some lofty aspiration (Acme, for example). This holds less true today than a generation ago; the latest crop of trade names may be distinguished by the way they provide no clue to the nature of the business (e.g., eBay, Verizon, Agoura). A former employer of mine opined that a business name ought to reflect the location and nature of the business. Thus, his shop carried not his personal name (which had an excellent reputation), but was called “Towson Foreign Car Service.” He figured, correctly, that his old customers would be motivated to find him, and that the name ought to attract new customers.

My thinking about naming a book business is that the first word of the trade name ought to be “book,” thus leading by the hand those who would turn to the alphabetical section of the telephone directory, rather than to our expensive classified advertising. Still others believe the name ought to position the business at the very beginning or tail end of an alphabetical list. Thus, the Baltimore telephone directory reads alphabetically from AAAA Action Bail Bonds to Zyzyx.

When writing about the names and their misappropriation, the temptation is almost overwhelming to quote Romeo (“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”) or Othello (“Who steals my purse steals trash…but he who filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.”) Although these quotations have become cliches, they illustrate the visceral attachment of a person to his name.

For some time now, encroachment on trade names has been an ugly fact of life. Stories abound about the crushing of the innocent by some juggernaut, the sad fate of a dissenting family member, or a decision made in haste and regretted at leisure. The number of tales about the Disney and McDonald’s companies crushing some innocent local business has reached the proportions of Urban Legend.

One especially outrageous instance happened here in Baltimore a few years ago, when a restaurateur was deprived of the use of her personal name by an electronics company. Sony Motoyama, a Filipino, had for several years run a successful eatery under the name Sony’s. When an overreaching staff lawyer at the electronics company got wind of this, the restaurant was forced to change its name, despite the fact that Baltimore’s Sony in no way competes with the multi-national corporation. Motoyama faced a choice between spending precious assets to defend a claim to her own name, or moving forward in the hope that her reputation would follow her, whatever might be inscribed on the door.

If you peruse the labels on wines produced by the Bully Hill Vineyard, you’ll discover that the proprietor has been forbidden by the courts from using his own name. The vintner is Walter Taylor, a member of the New York wine-making family which sold its identity to a large corporation. As the dissenting member of the family (the only one who wished to continue to pursue the family business), Walter got the short end of the stick.

In the motorcycle industry, Craig Vetter became known as the designer and maker of fiberglass “fairings,” those bits of bodywork that shield a motorcyclist from the elements. In a spectacular bit of hasty judgment, Vetter sold his trade name to a former employee, figuring to retire. A year later, when retirement proved not to be the bed of roses he’d expected, Vetter discovered that he was not only unable to trade upon his considerable reputation, but that if he re-entered the cycle accessory business in any way, he might find himself in breach of his contract of sale.

And perhaps one of the most spectacular trade name cases involved not a name, but handwriting. Chris Coyle, an enterprising independent real estate broker, made quite a splash in the market in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Enough so that after around five years in business, he received a lucrative buyout offer from one of the large regional firms. Coyle’s trademark was his signature, which appeared on all his signs and literature. The buyout included a non-competition clause, which forbade Coyle from again using his name in the business in Maryland. After less than two years, Coyle grew bored with retirement and decided to open a new brokerage in the same area. Since he couldn’t use his personal name, he dubbed the enterprise “Champion Realty,” and adopted the trademark comprising the company name, in his easily recognizable script. The paint was hardly dry on the signs before he was sued by the company that had bought him out, claiming trademark infringement, merely because the handwriting was recognizable. Coyle pressed his case and won, but at considerable expense.

In the old-book business, profitability is uncertain in the best of times, and does not permit prolonged and expensive legal battles over trade names. Often, someone borrows a trade name unconsciously, just because it sounds so darned good. A couple of years back, I discovered someone using “Book Miser” on Half.com. Predictably, the company would do nothing to mediate, and my frustration spilled over into a discussion thread online. A week or so later, Terry Laing revealed her identity as the interloper. She’d been reading the discussion with great interest, and to her horror, realized she was at the center of it! We sorted things out and have become fast friends, learning that we live only an hour’s drive from each other. Terry is active in WABA, doing business under the name Books and Spirit.

Shirley Bryant reports that she had discovered someone else doing business as “Authors and Artists.” Fortunately, that person agreed to change his ABE and Alibris information to eliminate possible confusion. But we’re not always that lucky. Trademark protection is not guaranteed, even by registering the trademark. You must affirmatively defend your trademark against all encroachments, in the hope that when The Big One comes along, you’ll succeed. For Disney, Sony and McDonald’s, it’s a relatively small matter to assign a staff attorney to attend to trademark problems. We booksellers don’t have that luxury.

In the long run, perhaps it’s easiest to use your own name as your trade name. While the Vetter and Taylor cases show the downside of this, in practice very few booksellers manage to sell their business name. Some of our most venerable booksellers have traded under their own names. Especially online, brand-names don’t seem to matter, and developing a brand-name identity in the babble of the Internet seems an exercise in frustration. The key to business longevity has always been repeat customers, and I don’t think that is about to change. We are creatures of habit. Our energies are best devoted to a personal relationship with each customer that makes it easy for them to develop the habit of returning to us for another purchase.

 Stan Modjesky 

bookmisr@valinet.com

BookWriter Professional: Flagship Software for Booksellers

BookWriter Professional is a new application created by Tom Sawyer, co-founder of Interloc and Alibris, serving as Chief Software Engineer from 1993-2001. His past creations include BookMaster, Record Manager, BookMate, Book Prices Realized, and the UIEE data exchange format. Last year, Tom produced the unique BookWriter Web composer, which effectively positions bookseller’s books in search engines. This exclusive IOBA article offers the first public disclosure of BookWriter Professional, the next step in the BookWriter series.

Tom, what’s the motivation behind BookWriter Professional?

I really enjoy producing software that’s actually useful, and I especially enjoy seeing booksellers make productive use of it. The last few years have offered a glimpse of what’s possible, but the technical learning curve is getting longer for many booksellers. Often, they spend more time pointing and clicking than actually doing book work. That’s a shame because computers are supposed to be tools, not an end unto themselves.

BwPro is a program I’ve been wanting to produce for a long time. I believe it takes the bookseller to the next level of productivity. It is a complete bookselling environment, and it manipulates data in ways that are currently very difficult to accomplish, particularly in a single program.

Is BwPro consistent with your previous software?

In some ways it is. It was a big surprise for me to learn how many booksellers are still using BookMaster and Record Manager. Apparently, I did something right. The old software still gets many jobs done satisfactorily, with minimal effort. But those programs are more than a decade old and they’re very much out of date.

I tried to code BwPro to carry the same philosophy forward into the Windows and Internet realms. A key design objective was to make BwPro so that a non-technical bookseller could do things with a minimum of trial-and-error. The result is that BwPro has a short learning curve. Most dealers who’ve tried it so far have jumped right in without having to read a manual. It’s as intuitive as I could make it.

Isn’t user-friendliness an objective in all software design?

Perhaps, but in my humble opinion it seldom actually happens. It seems like this should be an easy thing for a software designer to do, but it’s deceptively difficult. I think it’s similar to being a good writer — it’s easy to read and enjoy a finished product and fail to see the amount of work the author put into it. Few books can be enjoyed by young and old alike, be appreciated by both new and veteran readers, satisfy both the publishers and the readers, and yet stand up to the kind of intense scrutiny that accompanies a major work.

Good software is like that. It is REALLY hard to make a program universally workable while keeping complexity low and adaptability high. After nearly 20 years of doing this, I’m still learning and still don’t consider myself to be an expert. It takes a long time to do a good job. Every little thing requires constant back-and-forth testing and tweaking to make it right. One minor detail can take all day to resolve. That’s one reason it’s taken so long to finish.

What are the program’s basic features?

Like BookMaster and Record Manager, BwPro focuses on specific core aspects of bookselling. Inventory, Contacts, Wants, Uploading, Importing, Exporting, Composition, and Invoicing/Accounting are all core capabilities. The program also provides Internet-based features such as email, FTP, and the ability to look up specific books in Internet venues.

What features does BwPro provide and how are they presented?

To a great extent, the same factors that were important a decade ago are still important today: Easy, rapid and intuitive data entry is a big one, and BwPro provides a wealth of features to accomplish that. A good data entry system addresses both contemporary and antiquarian books, and I think BwPro does this well.

Booksellers also need to easily manage contacts and wants, upload records to multiple locations, import and export information quickly and easily, to professionally compose information in ways that will help sell books, and manage accounting information. BwPro addresses these things in a single package and tries to group their functionality logically, according to the real-world needs of the booksellers who make use of it. I’ve put things where I hope people will expect to find them, and provided capabilities that I hope will help booksellers become more productive.

Can you offer some examples of real-world needs BwPro addresses?

Sure. For instance, the Inventory Record dialogue provides the user with everything needed to quickly enter and edit records, but it also provides extensive image association controls. You can associate both on-line and off-line images, even combine them in a single record, and BwPro handles them seamlessly (see image). You can also see an instant preview of what a book record will look like when it is composed.

For those who do their book image scans in batches, BwPro will gather all images in a particular directory and automatically associate the images with records after the fact, based on the naming convention used. Anyone who’s ever done this manually knows what a huge timesaver this can be. BwPro can also perform the same operation on a database-wide level, for all records. A bookseller can sit down and scan images for 100 books, then go into BwPro and tell the program to associate all of the images with their corresponding records automatically, in one shot. It even retains the image sequencing specified according to the name suffix used (a, b, c, etc).

Another need is extracting ISBN codes from existing descriptions. Many booksellers have their ISBN data embedded in Comments or some other field. BwPro can scan database records, extract validated ISBN codes, and populate a dedicated ISBN field with the data. This in itself can save a bookseller hundreds of hours of hand-editing.

There are lots of little conveniences. For instance, you can get instant pricing data for any book. You can instantly look up any Zip Code, City or County, even display a map of it. You can load and save Hit Lists to create instant catalogs. There are lots of little goodies like this. Most of these features came about as a direct result of booksellers telling me: “Boy, it sure would be great if your program did such and such.” I’ve tried to accommodate these suggestions wherever possible.

What other problems does BwPro solve for booksellers?

Another big problem for many booksellers today is record format conversion. Frequently, they must convert UIEE to tab-delimited, or vice versa, or import data into a spreadsheet, or into an XML template, or export data in some way to meet the requirements of a particular web site or selling venue. More often than not, this results in data loss, or formatting problems, or incomplete records — the list of aggravations is long. It’s amazing how many hoops booksellers are forced to jump through to meet the requirements of different companies.

BwPro takes a much more down-to-earth approach to this, by providing many different ways to manipulate records. You can set up separate export templates for different sites, and even compose a set of different files and upload each one to a different location, in sequence.

There is also a group of stand-alone utilities that do things like convert a UIEE file into a tab-delimited file, read HomeBase database records, read ABE’s tagged data upload format, convert old BookMate PRV files into other formats, export to Excel .csv format, etc.

BookWriter Pro basically allows booksellers to do what they want with their data, instead of jumping through hoops or being restricted to what a company will allow — without having to be a technician or read an instruction manual to figure out how to do it.

Is BwPro compatible with existing BookMaster, Record Manager and BookMate databases?

Yes, existing records can be directly read and users can continue to use their old software if they so choose. But there are a lot of new fields and obviously the old software doesn’t know anything about these. Downward compatibility has its limits.

Walking the line between proprietary and generic design is a difficult balancing act. You have to provide a wide range of possibilities, but you have to do it within a recognizable framework. I think my predecessor applications were successful because they did this. I’ve tried hard to make BwPro do the same thing.

What other capabilities have you included?

Quite a few. There’s comprehensive global editing, price adjustment features, invoicing and purchase orders, and a lot of the favorite features of my predecessor software, such as Hit Lists, data entry menus, and an on-screen composer for producing catalogs, quotes, and similar documents. I’m still finalizing the complete feature set.

How does BookWriter Pro help booksellers sell more books?

Aside from serving as an excellent rapid data entry and sales management system, if I had to pick one thing it would be the program’s ability to perform rapid and complex manipulation and composition of book data. This serves both dependent sellers who upload records to listing services, and independent sellers who market their books directly to their own customers. Making data compatible with Internet-based requirements is a key design objective.

Do you feel today’s bookseller is faced with more obstacles than in the past?

I think there are more challenges and that few booksellers are well-equipped to address them. Most bookseller’s fundamental business requirements have really not changed in the past decade. What has changed is the extent to which information must be manipulated to suit different applications, and the compressed timeframe in which this must happen to take advantage of different revenue sources. These days, a successful bookseller’s list of requirements almost universally includes Internet sales venues and email.

Yet, there is really very little available to help them take advantage of these venues directly. This is surprising to me — these are not trivial issues! Most companies seem to either take a one-size-fits-all approach to their software, or they focus on a particular aspect of the business and ignore others. I’ve looked at quite a bit of 3rd-party software in the past year, and there are some very good programs out there. But few programs I’ve seen address these issues in ways that are intuitively obvious. They often seem to be logical extensions of a particular business, focusing and relying upon a specific methodology. Seller Engine is a good example of this, in that the program itself is an excellent piece of software, but it relies almost exclusively upon Amazon.com to provide intrinsic value to its users.

So, the short answer to your question is: BwPro makes it possible for a bookseller to overcome more obstacles by making the broadest possible use of their records, with the least amount of effort, in an understandable and comfortable environment. That’s a mouthful, but that’s how I see it.

What do you foresee in the near future for booksellers?

Today, it’s frankly a mess out there. If a bookseller wants to sell books simultaneously on Alibris, ABE, Amazon, eBay, and on their own web site, they must be very technically savvy, or they must utilize a distribution service like Chuck Vilnis’ excellent BookRouter system, or they must use multiple applications to do it — applications that usually don’t interact with one another very well, if at all. There’s a lot of frustration out there, and it’s no surprise. I get calls from dealers all the time wanting help doing one thing or another, and it’s usually something that should be simple for them to do, but it isn’t because their software didn’t provide any way to do it.

So, BwPro tries to make it easy for sellers to get as much work done in one place as possible, without having to jump from one program to another. I think future bookselling applications are going to have to address this if their creators expect merchants to use them. The “Service-Us” approach for client software is not a sustainable model, and companies who continue this approach in their designs will not survive the long haul, even if their programs are free.

In my humble opinion, BwPro positions a bookseller nicely for the next round of business and technological development. Those sellers who can quickly and easily manipulate their data in different ways are going to have distinct business advantages over those who cannot. In particular, the ability to manage the volume of information associated with collectible books on a field-oriented basis will become increasingly important as existing venues expand their infrastructures and data-handling capabilities. Ebay is a good example of this.

What does the software cost?

BookWriter Professional sells for $129.95. The setup has not yet been finalized, but I am accepting advance orders as I’ve had many inquiries and I need to cut down on my email volume somehow. Current BookWriter Web users will have their entire BwWeb purchase price applied to their BwPro purchase, and any new users who place an order prior to rollout will receive the BookWriter Web software as part of the package. Given the current state of development, I expect to have BwPro ready to launch in 30 days or less.

Tom, thanks again for an interesting interview. Where can dealers go to find more information?

You’re most welcome, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you again! Additional information about the software can be found athttp://www.bookwritersoftware.com/bwpro/bwpro.htm.

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