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ALL ARTICLES
Tom Sawyer – BookWriter Web
BookWriter Web: Getting Your Inventory Where it Belongs — In Front of Buyers! Tom Sawyer is a co-founder of Interloc and Alibris. He served as Chief Software Engineer from 1993-2001. Over the years, he has developed many widely used programs for booksellers, including BookMaster, Record Manager, BookMate, and the UIEE format many of us use every day. Mr. Sawyer is now preparing to release BookWriter, which may well become the standard against which the next generation of book
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Dec 2, 200212 min read
Charles Vilnis – BookRouter & Allusive Information Systems
URLS: http://www.allusys.com and http://www.bookrouter.com When Shirley Bryant approached me with a request to do an interview for the IOBA’s The Standard newsletter, it forced me to reflect on what it is my colleagues and I do at Allusive Information Systems and how we got here to be doing it…. From personal experience, I can tell you that book dealers and computer people are very much alike – generally independent, a bit eccentric and definitely passionate about the ingredi
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Dec 1, 200217 min read
Genuine Fakes: Mark Hoffman
“In October 1985, three bombs exploded in Salt Lake City, killing two innocent people & injuring a third, Mark Hofmann. Subsequent investigations revealed that the young documents dealer, Mark W. Hofmann, had planned and executed the bombings to cover up a five-year trail of deceit and forgery. Over twenty years have passed since Hofmann began his notorious career and while Hofmann spends his days at the Utah State Prison, his forgeries continue to appear in the marketplace a
Jim Arner
Nov 30, 200213 min read


Godsey’s Ravings
I have been taking a look lately at how books & booksellers are portrayed in the pop culture….and it ain’t pretty folks. If you were to pick up a remote today, you would find that only two prime time shows display the reading of books as an important part of their everyday routine: West Wing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, [ain’t that a kick in the head?] and the only one presently portraying anyone reading for pleasure is Gilmore Girls. Oh sure, you may see a kid doing their h
Joyce Godsey
Nov 29, 20023 min read
David Klappholtz, Book Collecting from a Collector’s viewpoint
David, when did you start being a book collector? Was it a particular book or subject that got you started? At some point in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s I decided that I wanted to express my artistic side by learning and doing photography. As was my habit, I learned by reading…lots and lots of how-to books on the technical and artistic aspects of photography. My specialty, motivated by my then hobby of growing flowering plants, especially lilies and day lilies, was close-
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Nov 28, 20029 min read


Collecting Lost Race Novels
The basis of the past popularity of Lost Race novels were the novels of H. Rider Haggard, whose excellence in such classic novels as Allan Quatermain and She hundreds of lesser talents recognized as worthy of imitation. Of course, Haggard didn’t invent the idea of lost races, which was abroad from antiquity, in cultural myths about submerged former inhabitants of conquered regions, in utopians and Swiftian satires of distant island cultures, in speculations on the whereabouts
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Nov 27, 20026 min read


The More Things Change . . . Where we have been and where we are going in the Online Book World
(Keynote Speech from the Summer 2002 Colorado Book Seminar) First, the beginnings – at least for me. Dick Weatherford By the time this particular day rolled around in late October, 1978, about a week before Halloween, I had been buying and selling books for a half dozen years. I had a book catalog finished and at the printer, but my “real” job was as an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. My wife, Harriet, and I had two sons, Matt, age 9, and Steve, a
Richard Weatherford
Nov 26, 200223 min read


Six Crises and a Challenge
Among those who post regularly on the message boards of the various booksellers’ communities that I frequent, it is safe to say that the company Amazon.com and its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos are somewhat unpopular. While this phenomenon is not universal, there is a culture of Amazon-bashing across all these communities, in which no topic or rumor is too trivial or too grand for the regulars to resist taking potshots. Bezos is blamed for everything that is perceived as being w
Stephen Windwalker
Nov 26, 200212 min read


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