Dear Booksellers,

First of all, many thanks to all of you who attended our summit in Victoria earlier this month, and to those who have been watching the event from afar. It was great to meet with over 30 booksellers in our offices, and it’s been very interesting for us to read the forums and to see what information the attendees passed on to their colleagues. It’s also been very interesting to see which postings have inspired the most follow-on discussion.

To follow is a summary of the event from the Abebooks’ perspective. We’ve taken as a basis for our "report" the questions that have been asked and the observations that were shared by the attendees. As this is a long document, we have broken it up into linked sections to make it more manageable for you to read.

So, for the record:

Bookseller Topic 1: Why did Abebooks have this summit, and what did you hope to accomplish? Do you think it was successful?
After the closing of the “reseller programs” (Amazon, Half, B&N) last Fall, and the site problems we experienced at roughly the same time, we thought it was important to invite booksellers to come to our Victoria head office and meet us face to face....

Bookseller Topic 2: Why did you pay for some booksellers to come? Why didn’t you spend more money? (Why didn’t you spend less?)
We knew this would be a more valuable experience for all involved if booksellers from all over North America came, but that many wouldn’t be able to because of the cost (both in terms of time and money)...

Bookseller Topic 3: What meaningful information did we share with the attendees?
1. We officially announced the new mission statement and brand mantra...

Bookseller Topic 4: The Abebooks Mission Statement
Our Mission Statement: “Our mission is to help people find and buy any book from any bookseller anywhere.” Since we introduced this at the summit, many booksellers have said...

Bookseller Topic 5: Way too much information was packed into the day. It should have been two days.
Yup, we agree, it was too much information for the day. But it came from the right place: we wanted each department to have a chance to put themselves in front of you and explain what they do and take questions.

Bookseller Topic 6: Saturday was a complete waste of time.
This may be true. The reason Saturday was a free day was to give the booksellers who came so far an opportunity to see Victoria, to meet with one another, to do some book-hunting if they chose...

Bookseller Topic 7: The whole summit was purposely planned to introduce Mandatory Credit Card processing.
It simply happened that the summit provided a timely opportunity to make this announcement...

Mythbusters: Clarification of a few more details from the booksellers reports:
We aren’t building a glamorous new office building from the foundation up. As nice as that would be...

Some favorite Bookseller quotes
“Hannes does not have horns and he does not carry a pitchfork.”...

In closing, we consider our Bookseller Summit to have been a great success and we plan to have another next year. We’ve learned a lot from this event and will take those lessons and all the bookseller feedback into consideration for next year. Also, we’ll share some of the details we revealed at the Summit with the wider community of booksellers as we move through the year, so please be sure to read your Bookseller Digest, and to join the Bookseller Advisory Group if you would like to be more involved in decision-making, especially in regard to product development.

Thanks again to everyone for their interest in the Summit. 2006 is going to be a very exciting year at Abebooks, with many important new products coming to make our site work better for buyers and sellers alike. The anniversary campaign will start to gear up for the May – July time period, and we’re looking forward to working with you all to celebrate by selling even more of your books.

Sincerely,

The Abebooks Team