From the Editor by Craig Stark #19, 24 May 2004

First, I'd like to thank all BookThinker readers who have made donations to BookThink in the past two weeks. Your generosity is greatly appreciated and will help us move forward with additional website features.

The final installment in a series of articles about photographing books appears in today's issue. It may be the most important. Lots of us know how to take adequate photographs of books, but many sellers don't know how (or aren't willing) to close this out - that is, camera images aren't edited into something special. More than ever, booksellers need to maintain a competitive edge to succeed, and producing quality images of products helps this along considerably. It's true that image editing software can be daunting. It's often complex and feature-rich, almost defying mastery. However, knowledge of a few editing techniques is all that's required for our purposes, and this can be acquired and put into practice with minimal effort.

A brief look ahead. Next month will be publishing an issue devoted entirely to the current state of the used book market. Lots of numbers. Lots of analysis. If you've been flying by the seat of your pants until now, we'll be offering some hard information that may help you steer your business in the coming months. Stay tuned!