From the Editor by Craig Stark #40, 4 April 2005

I bought some software a week or two ago, and - no exaggeration - I'm here to tell you it was the best $49.99 I've spent in years. On the impact scale, this is a solid 10 for me and, thinking back, easily as significant as several other major changes/improvements I've made in bookselling, among them switching from dial-up to cable and purchasing a digital camera and OCR software. If you haven't been keeping up with recent advances in voice recognition software, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how accurate, fast and cheap it's become - and perhaps outright astonished at how much time it can save you. See today's feature article, "How Fast Can You Talk?" for more information.

April's Bookseller Profile features New York bookseller Catherine Petruccione of Old Scrolls Book Shop. Entering her 5^th year in bookselling, Catherine is both an open shop and online dealer and has achieved success despite holding down a full-time job. If you haven't seen a gorgeous bookshop lately, you have to take a tour of this one. Wow.

By the way, additional profiles have been coming in - and thank you! - but not at what I'd call a furious rate. A gentle reminder: the purpose of doing these isn't to entertain or provide free advertising space to booksellers promoting personal websites. Or to embarrass anybody who's publicity shy. Rather, it's to share bookselling knowledge, to offer practical ideas, tips, advice, etc., on how we might improve our businesses. Anybody who has been in this business for any length of time has acquired bookselling wisdom. Please consider sharing some of it with your fellow booksellers. Contact me at editor@bookthink.com and I'll forward a profile template (which you may customize to accommodate your idiosyncrasies).

Finally, Part II of the Gold Edition's four-part series on buying inventory online will be delivered Monday evening, April 4. Again, we're still getting some bounce-backs, so if you don't receive your issue by Tuesday morning, contact me, and I'll re-send it ASAP. If necessary, I'll put you on our alternate subscriber's list, which is sent via a different server. Note to New Subscribers: Parts II, III and IV will be published without interruption in, respectively, April, May and June. Any new subscriber who wishes to backdate their subscription to Part I (March 7) may do so throughout the publication window of this series. Subscribe before the June issue appears, for example, and you may still start your subscription with the March issue.