In the Shadow of the Giants

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INDEPENDENTS ONLINE A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books
www.bookstore.com
Inventory search option, staff favorites, guest reviews, and featured sections on travel guides and romance titles.

Booksmith
www.booksmith.com
Strong niche areas are fiction, backlist fiction, cookbooks, science fiction, mystery, cyberpunk, poetry, film, children's books. Also signed books.

Cody's
www.codysbooks.com
Large selection of academic and technical books. Searchable database of 140,000 titles.

Davis-Kidd
www.daviskidd.com
Large general bookstore. Site includes calendar of events, book reviews, interviews, bestseller lists.

Hawley-Cooke
www.hawley-cooke.com
100,000 book titles, 20,000 music titles, 2,000 multimedia titles.

Kepler's
www.keplers.com
Literary fiction, children's books including some in Spanish, magazines and newspapers from home and abroad, computer books. Also staff recommendations, book reviews, and an events calendar.

Liberties Fine Books, Music & Cafe
www.liberties.com
One-million-title searchable database. Signed copies, e-mail notification service.

Midnight Special
www2.msbooks.com/msbooks/
Cultural, social, and political books.

Powell's
www.powells.com
One million new and used books in all subject areas. Out-of-print title searches.

Tattered Cover
www.tattered cover.com
Large, iconic, all-purpose bookstore. Site covers services and events as well.

Wellington's
www.wellingtons.com
Specializes in Southern writers and children's literature.

Also see:

BookWire
www.bookwire.com
Very useful index to general booksellers.

American Booksellers Association
www.bookweb.org
Members' home page has links to stores with online services.

Northern California Independent Booksellers Association
www.nciba.com
Lists 48 member operations including those with online book sites connected to real stores.

How to translate that commitment into retail terms is the task that the independents face every day of their work lives. Dan Cullen, editor of the trade magazine American Bookseller, recently advised indies to consider themselves personal information managers rather than tradespeople. In his view, the true role for the bookstore of the future, and the key to its survival, is as a source of continuous, in-depth, one-on-one dialogue with its customers. In this vision of bookseller as social director, stores must reach out via e-mail, the Web, customer databases, and whatever other resources they can cultivate to discover what valued customers want to read and whether they'd like to meet other people interested in the same subjects. With 50,000 titles published annually in the United States, we need help moving through the thicket from a partner who cares enough to keep our intellectual and other needs in mind, someone whose job is to serve us. We have money managers for our money--why not information managers for our minds? Stranger things have been dreamed of.

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