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A thread on a bookselling list this evening prompted this last minute article from me. I can’t even say I thought it through well before writing it; it is based on observations over a period of time and on just plain common business sense and gut feeling. More important, I think, than rehashing what is in this issue. I’m seeing a feeling of helplessness and despair in some fellow booksellers. Partly caused by the influx of so many people selling books online, partly caused by

Table of Contents From the editor ISBN Lookup – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly Different Times, Different Climes, Different Crimes! BookWriter Web for HomeBase Interview with Tom Sawyer Anti-War Book Collecting The myth of the book On Collecting (and selling) Books on Bullfighting Booksellers, the First Amendment and Customer Privacy Closing one store, opening another Early Dressage Literature to 1800 Patriot Act George Alfred Henty, 1832 – 1902, History Teacher? Neglected Am

Call for replacement When the fall, 2003 issue goes live some time in November, I’ll have been editor for 2-1/2 years and will have put out 10 issues of The IOBA Standard. It has been great fun, and I’ve enjoyed very much helping it grow and watching it take on a life of its own. I hope it has been something good for the book world, and that it has helped educate and entertain. But…that fall, 2003 issue will be my last as editor. To keep The IOBA Standard fresh, improving and

Over the last few years the ISBN has become a lot more important to many, if not most, online booksellers. Many of the larger sites are using ISBN lookups to match a bookseller’s listing to information about that title pulled from an ISBN database. When it works, it’s a quick and efficient way to provide additional information about a book to supplement the bookseller’s listing or free the bookseller from having to enter that information themselves. However, often it results

This review includes a trio of books that differ greatly, even in the broad genre of mystery novels. Settings and periods range from Vienna at the in 1910 and Melbourne, Australia in the 1980s to Washington D.C. in 2000. The protagonists differ drastically too, almost as much as the authors of the books. One thing the writers do have in common: this is the first novel for each of them Another is that none of the three have made it big since they appeared a couple of years ago

BookWriter Web was created by Thomas A. Sawyer, co-founder and software designer for Interloc/Alibris, as well as the creator of the UIEE information exchange format used by booksellers worldwide. Tom was previously interviewed in two IOBA articles (http://www.ioba.org/newsletter/archive/v8/tomsawyer.html andhttp://www.ioba.org/newsletter/archive/v9/bwwebinterview1.html). In this latest interview, Shirley Bryant asked Tom about the latest version of the BookWriter Web softwar

From a bookseller’s viewpoint, “military books” are usually lumped together as a subset of the history section. But this popular genre has many sub-categories. Among military buffs are those who read biographies of the great leaders; others whose interest is the minutiae of a particular war or even a specific battle; some with an abiding interest in the theory and principles of warfare; a significant number for whom the weapons and equipment of warfare (or of a particular war

People have been pestering me for years to write a book. I have yet to accomplish this. That is not to say that I haven’t written reams of things that could probably fill many books. However, collecting enough singular thoughts or trains of thoughts into a book-sized collection of pages seems beyond me. No one in their right mind wants to write a book, but EVERYONE I have ever met wants to have written a book; these two things are completely dissimilar. Writing a book is a pa