Project Lead: Allen Firstenberg

The BookSense Bestsellers list appears in publications nationwide, increasing recognition for the BookSense, Inc. name. Bookweb.org, the American Booksellers Association homepage, features a complete listing of publications carrying the lists.

The lists are generated from the sales numbers reported by hundreds of independent booksellers every week, using the system OCI worked with the American Booksellers Association and BookSense, Inc. to design.

Problem

Diversity of User Base

BookSense, Inc. serves the independent bookseller community; this means that any project they implement has to account for the wide variety of users involved. Users are potentially on different platforms, using different software. They can be expected to have varying technical skills and comfort levels with their computer system. All this played into the design decisions on this project.

Consistent reporting is vital to the success of the project, so the system has to encourage regular reporting through a user-friendly interface.

Report Generation

The information collected through this system is only valuable to BookSense and the ABA if they can access and distribute it easily. We needed to make it easy and time-effective to generate the reports needed.

Future Viability

Not only did the system need to account for current disparities, but it had to be adaptable for future developments in the bookselling industry. As new technology is available, booksellers will be adopting it just as other industries adopt new ideas and tools. For the long-term usefulness of the project, changes in the industry had to be easily handled.

Solution

Flexible Design

Users can upload their information directly from any of seven different Point of Sales (POS) systems. Additionally, only minimal changes are necessary to add new POS systems to the list of those booksellers can upload information from directly.

Results

Marketing exposure

The BookSense Bestsellers List is a significant source of advertising for BookSense, Inc. The placements received by the list are equivalent to thousands of dollars of advertising.

The time involved in producing the list has been reduced to from four full days every week to one day a week, while the number of variants on the list has increased. The ability to create specialty lists allows BookSense staff to appeal to niche publications without having to devote vast amounts of time to creating a specialty list by hand. The system handles the creation of new lists easily.

News Stories Involving This Project

June 13, 2002 -- Book Sense Bestseller Reporting - Never Faster, Never Easier

Tools and Technologies:

• Java 2 Enterprise Edition
• Oracle
• Perl
• Excel