At the American Booksellers Association’s annual meeting at BEA, ABA chief executive Oren Teicher celebrated encouraging membership and indie sales data and reinforced that “I believe this moment in our industry is rich with promise and opportunity.” (In addition to the data we have already reported, Teicher declared that across the network of Indie Commerce stores, “gross annual sales, year-to-date over year-to-date, are up 92 percent.” And separately, ABA board vice president Steve Bercu clarified that the reported gain of 55 new full ABA members comprises 77 new locations in all.)
Teicher told members “you have our strongest assurance that there will be a first-class e-book solution(s) in place well in advance of Google’s January termination of their program,” underscoring that “this is ABA’s number-one immediate goal.” I without promising a date he said “we fully expect that by the holiday season our new e-book solution will be in place.” Plus “it’s our goal and our hope that the new e-book solution will be more robust and more flexible than the Google program, offering more choices to a broader spectrum of the membership.”
Teicher’s other main focus was to encourage booksellers once again to write to the Department of Justice about their proposed ebook pricing settlement by June 25. “I urge you as strongly as possible to leave this room today with the commitment to write that letter to the DOJ. And, just as important, each of us should commit ourselves to getting five friends and colleagues to write as well.” (We’ve run the mailing address in the past; the ABA added the email address of John.Read@usdoj.gov as well.)
Teicher drew applause from the room when he expressed gratitude that “Macmillan and Penguin are fighting on behalf of the agency model, and it’s important to note that there are still other publishers employing the agency model.”