Bookselling News: ABA Headed to New Offices

by John Mutter, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 3/18/2005

The ABA, which sold its headquarters in Tarrytown, N.Y. last year, will be moving into new offices this summer. The association has signed a lease to move to new offices about one mile from its present location. The move will enable the association to consolidate its staff into one building.

Snow Goose Bookstore in Stanwood, Wash., about 60 miles north of Seattle, is a leader in the fight to keep Wal-Mart from opening in the picturesque, Scandinavian-style town that is the main connection to Camano Island, according to the Sakgit Valley Herald. Co-owner Kristine Kaufman said that rather than let Wal-Mart move in, she and others would like the town to attract a mix of small businesses and want to create an economic development organization to help market Stanwood to companies.

Incidentally Snow Goose plans to open a branch in Brindles Marketplace in the Camano Commons commercial complex, which is on Camano Island.

Here's yet another twist in the battle over high college textbook prices: Connecticut's Board of Governors for Higher Education has recommended that campus libraries carry at least one copy of every required textbook and put them on reserve, according to the Waterbury Republican-American.

The Board also is requiring all state public colleges to "form committees to investigate textbook pricing." Among other things, the committees would make sure professors know the price of books before assigning them; have bookstores list prices early so students can seek better deals elsewhere; and urge professors to use books for more than one year.

One community college president noted that in some cases, "part-time students taking one course paid more for the books than the course."

Borders Books and Music is opening a store in Aiea on the island of Oahu in Hawaii next September. The 22,603-sq.-ft. store will be in the Pearlridge Center off Kamehameha Highway and is Borders's seventh in Hawaii. (The others are in Honolulu and on Maui and Kauai.)

The store is in an unusual location. Pearlridge Center is the state's largest enclosed shopping center, has the only monorail in Hawaii and offers views of Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial.

Books-A-Million is increasing its next quarterly dividend by 67%! But hold onto your hats: the jump will be by two cents a share, making the grand total five cents a share, payable to stockholders of record as of the end of the day March 29.