Celebrating Our 8th Birthday
From features on our Heritage Sellers to special messages from our founders, Rick Pura and Keith Waters, it's been a time to celebrate our 8th Birthday with our booksellers! On May 7th, we hosted a birthday celebration at Sidney Antiquarian Book Fair. We met with booksellers from Victoria, Vancouver and beyond who all came to sell books and share their love of bookselling.

We also took this opportunity to draw our Grand Prize of 6 months free subscription fees from entries from booksellers around the world. We're pleased to announce that Leigh Holleschau of High Castle Books won the draw! See pictures of this event and the draw.

Visit Leigh's book shop on Abebooks. Thank you to all who entered!

Book Expo America: Please come by and visit us at the BEA June 4-6th, booth number #3758, in the McCormick Place Convention Center. We look forward to seeing you!

20th Annual Printers Row Bookfair: We will be attending the fair and, working with our member booksellers, giving out plenty of promotional materials to fair attendees! We will be hosting a wine and cheese reception exclusively for booksellers at Blackie's Restaurant, 755 South Clark Street, Chicago (corner of Polk and Clark) Friday evening, June 4th, from 6:30-8:30pm. We hope to see you there. Please RSVP to booksellercentral@abebooks.com if you are able to attend.

Hay-on-Wye: We'll be there to support our booksellers by providing promotional materials and directing buyers to participating bookseller shops. Buyers will receive postcards with information on participating bookstores they can visit to receive their free promotional gifts (supplied by Abebooks).

See how we are promoting our booksellers at Hay-on-Wye and Printer's Row by viewing the bookmarks here. If there is a festival coming up in your area and you would like to some promotional materials, let us know by writing to booksellercentral@abebooks.com.

Launched this month

We've modified our Abebooks credit card processing fees! Previously, credit card processing fees were applied to all books in an order. Now, the 5.5% processing fee will only be applied to the "order" (total of all books), not each individual book.

More improvements launched this month include:

" Improved search functions
" Exclude books from being matched to ISBN's. More information on ISBN matching.
" New book listing filters to reduce the number of buyers being redirected away from your booklistings. More information on how our bookfilters work.

New! Bookseller Workshop in June

This month Neil Cournoyer (ABAC, ILAB) will be hosting the first Bookseller Workshop. Please join Neil on Wednesday, May 26th at 7 PM EST in the Bookseller Community Forums for an insightful look into the ins and outs of book descriptions. As one of the booksellers nominated for best book descriptions, Neil has excellent insight into describing books and will detail how to create clear and consistent book descriptions. The workshop will last 1 hour, but we hope that you will continue to discuss this topic on your own in our forums.

The time to list your books on Barnes & Noble.com is now! Recently, BNBQ made an adjustment which will ensure more of your books will be able to be listed on their site. By increasing the maximum book price to US$2500 (from US$2000) and lowering the minimum price allowable to US$1.99 (previously US$ 2.01), more books will be made available to their buyers.

If you're currently listing on BNBQ through Alibris, but would prefer to list through Abebooks, now's the time to switch. All BNBQ participants are automatically eligible to win 6 months free subscription fees on Abebooks, so join today! To do so, simply visit this page.

New applications to join the program can be completed through this page.

What are the HOT selling books on Amazon.com?
Find out what's selling at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca? Check out their bestselling titles: Amazon.com or Amazon.ca.

Don't let your sales drop in Half!

eBay will be closing its Half.com site as of July 15, 2004. Help Half.com customers find you by downloading our Abebooks branded labels and use on all your shipments to Half.com buyers. Download these labels. You can also request supplies of co-brandable bookmarks by writing to booksellercentral@abebooks.com.

Chat Schedule

Please join Sue Connors, Director of Bookseller Community, for lively and informative discussions during our popular "Chat with Sue @ 2" chat time. Chats are held every other Thursday at 2 PM PST. The next scheduled chat is Thursday, May 27th. We would love to have you join!

Upcoming Roundtables:
Please join Hannes, Lisa and Sue for the next Abebooks Roundtable event June 21 at 9 AM PST. We hope to see you there!

Barnes & Noble Program Special Roundtable
Interested in finding out how to improve your sales on BNBQ or have questions about your participation? Please join Laura-Lea Berna and Simon Au for our special BNBQ Roundtable, to be held on Thursday May 27, 2004 at 2 PM PST. This is your chance to ask questions and provide feedback to Laura-Lea and Simon, so please come and participate!

Best Book Description Contest: Recently we asked our bookseller community to nominate and then vote for the bookseller who they felt had the best book descriptions. The winner is in! Please congratulate Steven Temple of Steven Temple Books. He’s been a bookseller with Abebooks since 1997 and is a member of ABAC and ILAB. View the results.

Steven’s prize will be a feature of his books on our homepage, receiving over 800,000 views per week!

This month, meet Abebooks Bookseller Kristen Alexander of Alexander Fax Booksellers in Canberra, Australia. As a military books specialist, we recently featured Kristen in our ANZAC Day promotion, and thought that Kristen's background would be of interest to all our booksellers. Here's her story. [More]

Watch for these Upcoming Enhancements

Vacation System: Planning on going on vacation? Just in time for summer, we've made an enhancement to make using our vacation system easier than ever. Now when you go online to add your vacation "start date" to the vacation system, you can also add your "return date". Your books will be restored to all Abebooks sites on the day you return back to your shop. There's no need to re-send us your inventory or contact us to let us know you're back; we'll do the work for you!

Textbook Central: With textbook season just a couple of months away, we'll be launching our new Textbooks Central, making it easier and faster for students to find your books! You can view the new page at: http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Textbooks/

Great news for booksellers in Australia and New Zealand! Next month we will launch our Australian microsite; focusing exclusively on Australian and New Zealand content!

Abebooks Advisory Group; we need you!

It's that time again! Every 6 months or so, we introduce new members to our advisory group. To ensure that this group truly represents our booksellers, we would like to include as many possible types of booksellers: those using Homebase or their own custom conversion programs, those who are in our Bookseller Programs, large and small inventories, specialist and generalists, and from around the world. If you would like to share in this important work, please apply to join our Advisory Group by filling out the application.

Also, you can find out more about our Advisory Group, including current members.