Book Sense: Encyclopedia - Book Sense

Book Sense

Book Sense is a marketing program of the American Booksellers Association, in which many independently-owned (non-chain) bookstores across North America participate, in order to better compete with the large book chains. The booksense.com Web site, which can be accessed via Wikipedia's ISBN lookup, has a large database of books (over 2 million titles). Shoppers are directed to the Web site of the nearest participating member bookseller, calculated by ZIP code.

The Book Sense program includes a series of bestseller lists. These often vary significantly from lists such as the well-known New York Times bestseller lists because of how they are calculated. The New York Times list includes all book sales, including grocery stores, gift shops, independent bookstores, large chains, and drug stores. The Book Sense lists consider only sales from independent bookstores.

Book Sense also offers gift certificate and gift card programs that allow customers to purchase a certificate in one book store and redeem it in another.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Book Sense", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki