BTW News Briefs

Atlas Books Looks to Step In for Closed BookWorld

The small press distributor BookWorld, headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, closed its doors on Friday, September 28, and the fate of its 104 publisher-clients remains uncertain. Atlas Books of Ashland, Ohio, the trade book distribution division of BookMasters, hopes to take over distribution for most of BookWorld's publishers. Watch for more information in next week's BTW.

NRF to Credit Card Companies: Stop Forcing Retailers to Store Credit Card Data

On October 4, citing concern over data breaches, the National Retail Federation sent a letter to Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council, requesting changes in how the credit card industry requires merchants to store credit card data. "All of us -- merchants, banks, credit card companies and our customers -- want to eliminate credit card fraud," said NRF Chief Information Officer David Hogan in the letter. "But if the goal is to make credit card data less vulnerable, the ultimate solution is to stop requiring merchants to store card data in the first place."

Credit card companies typically require retailers to store credit card numbers anywhere from one year to 18 months in order to satisfy card company retrieval requests. According to NRF, retailers should have a choice as to whether or not they want to store credit card numbers at all.

The letter outlines the retail industry's commitment to PCI compliance while addressing the issue that PCI itself does not discourage hackers from attempting breaches of retailers' systems. "With this letter, we are officially putting the credit card industry on notice," said Hogan. "Instead of making the industry jump through hoops to create an impenetrable fortress, retailers want to eliminate the incentive for hackers to break into their systems in the first place."

Hogan outlined NRF's approach in the letter, stating that credit card companies and their banks should provide merchants with the option of keeping nothing more than the authorization code provided at the time of sale and a truncated receipt, rather than requiring that merchants keep reams of data for an extended period of time, putting retail customers at unnecessary risk. A full version of the letter can be found at www.nrf.com.

NRF Releases 2007 Holiday Season Forecast

On September 20, the National Retail Federation released its forecast for the upcoming 2007 holiday season, predicting that sales will rise 4.0 percent this year to $474.5 billion. "Retailers are in for a somewhat challenging holiday season as consumers are faced with numerous economic obstacles," said NRF Chief Economist Rosalind Wells. "With the weak housing market and current credit crunch, consumers will be forced to be more prudent with their holiday spending."

The 2007 holiday sales increase is expected to fall below the 10-year average of 4.8 percent. It would represent the slowest holiday sales growth since 2002, when sales rose 1.3 percent. The retailers most affected by the economy will be those catering to the low to middle income consumer. This could spell trouble for discounters and some department stores whose shoppers may be looking to trade down.

Alice Notley Receives the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

On October 3, the Academy of American poets announced that Alice Notley's Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970 - 2005 (Wesleyan University Press) was chosen by poets David Baker, Mark McMorris, and Marie Ponsot to receive the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most outstanding book of poetry published the previous year. The finalist for the award is David Wojahn for his collection Interrogation Palace (University of Pittsburgh Press).

About Notley's winning book, judge Marie Ponsot, author of Springing (Knopf) remarked, "These poems give us 35 years of political, personal, death-defying engagement. The nature Notley most loves is human nature. That urban passion propels her speculative dramas of gender, class, and race; of Vietnam and Iraq; of schemes of power and the claims of art. Ardent and agile, she is willing to cry out, to drift, to stammer, so as to put every turn of language to her use. Her aim is to speak to everyone; her book shows her success."

Ohio Suffers Setback in Bid to Join Streamlined Sales Tax Project

Ohio suffered a "major setback" in its bid to join the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, as reported by Business First Columbus. Richard A. Levin, the Ohio Tax Commissioner, reported that the state could not reach an agreement with the board overseeing the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement in regards to an exemption for Ohio businesses doing less than $500K in annual delivery sales in Ohio, the article noted.

Ohio loses between $350 million to $400 million annually in lost tax revenue from companies with no operations in Ohio, "a chief reason why the state has sought to become a full coalition member," BFC reported.

Kimberly Reynolds Named VP of Ingram Book Group for Marketing and Creative Services

This week, Ingram Book Group Inc. announced the appointment of Kimberly Reynolds to the position of vice president for marketing and creative services. Reynolds is the former director of marketing and communications at Saint Thomas Health Services in Nashville.

Reynolds will lead the development and execution of strategic marketing and communications for all Ingram Book Group channels including Ingram Book Company, Ingram Publisher Services, Spring Arbor, Ingram Library Services, Ingram International and Ingram Periodicals. She will also work closely with the Ingram sister companies -- Ingram Digital Group and Lightning Source Inc. -- on cross-company initiatives.

Six Women Receive Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Awards

At a ceremony on September 27 in New York City, six women writers were honored by the Rona Jaffe Foundation with awards of $25,000 each. The Writers Awards program was created by Jaffe, who passed away in 2005, to address the particular difficulties that many women writers have in finding time to write. The Jaffe Writers Awards are given to writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

The 2007 recipients are:

• Elif Batuman, currently working on her first novel, My Apprenticeship;
• Sarah Braunstein, currently working on her first novel, Split;
• Robin Ekiss, finishing her first collection of poems, The Mansion of Happiness;
• Alma Garcia, working on her first novel, Shallow Waters;
• Jennifer Grotz, working on her second collection of poems (her first collection, Cusp, won the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2003);
• Holly Goddard Jones, just completed her first story collection, Girl Trouble.