News
An Action-Packed WI 15
With new technology offerings and controversy surrounding a speaker,
there was no shortage of hot topics at the ABA’s annual gathering,which wrapped up in Baltimore on Friday
A
total of 1,500 people registered for Winter
Institute 15, the American Booksellers Asso-
ciation’s annual conference for independent
booksellers, which took place in Baltimore
January 21–24. Of those registered, 800 were booksellers.
This year’s event opened with a variety of programs,
including a symposium in Washington, D.C., focusing on
efforts to combat Amazon’s market dominance in bookselling,
hosted by the ABA. After agreeing that breaking up Amazon
would be the simplest solution to lessening the e-tailer’s clout,
many booksellers expressed dismay that the company may
be too big for even the government to confront.
Still, they were urged on to action. “It is possible to initiate
change,” said panelist Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The
100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy
(S&S). “You have already started it—and we’ve had more
antitrust conversation in our politics this election cycle than
anytime in the previous 25 years.”
Technology was front and center at this year’s institute.
Bookshop, the new online bookstore launched by Catapult
publisher Andy Hunter, goes into beta next week. The site,
which replaces the e-commerce function of the ABA’s
IndieBound, aims to give book buyers another online option
and give ABA member stores a chance to earn a 25%
affiliate fee. While Bookshop has a good deal of support as
a marked upgrade from IndieBound, some booksellers are
also skeptical about the program.
John Rubin of Above the Treeline presented Edelweiss360,
which offers a faster way for indies to market to customers
than Mailchimp and Constant Contact. All the materials
needed to create a marketing email, including book covers
and copy, are within Edelweiss. Treeline is also developing
mobile websites for bookstores, which will eventually be
available as individual bookstore apps, so that bookstores
can sell direct to customers.
In addition, the long-awaited Batch for Books invoicing
service, which collates a publisher’s invoices into a single
payment system for booksellers, is being tested among a
small group of ABA bookstores. HarperCollins, Macmillan,
and Penguin Random House have signed on to the system,but Hachette and Simon & Schuster have not. More book-
stores are expected to test the system this year, but no launch
date has been set.
This year’s Winter Institute seemed to be more politically
charged than usual, perhaps due to the event’s proximity to
Washington, D.C., during the impeachment hearings. Or the
tone might have been set by the prominent activist authors
who presented keynotes on Wednesday afternoon and
Thursday morning. Calling out to a packed ballroom, Rebecca
Solnit noted that her success as an author of books on femi-
nism, politics, and environmental issues has been due to the
support of booksellers. “You are Rebecca’s 600 mommies,
and we’re all here together at last,” she said. Solnit, whose
memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is due from
Viking in March, thanked booksellers for embracing diversity,
declaring, “You all are why people can read those books,” and
describing bookstores as “temples of resistance.”
During Thursday morning’s keynote, Jennifer Finney
Boylan, author of Good Boy, My Life in Seven Dogs (Celadon,
Apr.), who once worked at the New York City branch of a
Canadian bookstore chain and also at Penguin, echoed
Solnit’s sentiments, celebrating books during a time when,
she says, “the nature of truth is under attack” by the Trump
administration.4 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JANUARY 27, 2020
Kris Kleindienst (l.), the co-owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis;
Wednesday afternoon keynote speaker Rebecca Solnit; and Perseus
Books Group sales rep Johanna Hynes (r.).continued on p. 6PHOTOBY
CLAIREKIRCH