We thrill as she casts off her grim past to join a Wall Street investment firm, finds love, and indulges in fine sweaters.

The Book Sense Gift Card can be used at more than 300 U.S. bookstores. These stores are members of the ABA, a trade group for independent bookstores (largely dealers of new books or new/used hybrid shops). The gift card is available in denominations of $10-$100. You can verify that there are participating stores near your book lover using this search form. Cards can be purchased at stores or from many of their websites. Here’s a link to the gift card at Skylight Books’ site.

Gift certificate offerings are surprisingly absent from many of the indy-friendly book marketplace sites. Biblio.com is one of the few that has them. Gift certificates, delivered by email, are available starting at $5.00. Biblio.com is an online book marketplace with “over 5000 independent book sellers worldwide, listing over 50 million used, rare, out-of-print books, and hard-to-find books.”

Gift certificates can often be purchased, online or over the phone, from your book lover’s local bookshop. Also, many online book dealers, including Using Books, sell them.

Though I risk a deluge of comment spam by even leaving the comments open on an entry with “gift certificates” in the title, I’d love to hear of other indy gift certificate options for book lovers in the comments.

I’ve made it to a few Southern California Friends of the Library book sales in the last few weeks. None of them approach the size of Seattle’s hangar-filling sale, but I’ve picked up some solid stock. I haven’t seen as much aggressive behavior down here. I’ve been skipping the preview sales which tend to be more cutthroat.

Barring any of that, I’d be happy just to meet up with other book dealers in the area for a coffee or beer.

A bookseller copied me today on a complaint he sent to Abebooks. The gist of the problem was this. A customer ordered a book, and the dealer requested extra charges for shipping since the book was heavy. This happened over a weekend and the customer was out of email contact for a few days. Four days elapsed, and Abebooks cancelled the order automatically. The customer, thinking the book was not available, bought a copy from someone else.

I completely sympathize with the dealer’s anger at the lost sale. . . .

But I also think that the “extra charges” feature is plain bad business. We live in a world of one-click ordering online, and when book buyers place an order, they reasonably expect that they are going to get the book in the mail.

“Extra charges” is a messy solution to the equally messy question of how to set shipping rates. Online booksellers should always figure the extra cost of shipping a heavy book into its price. But the difference in postage cost between a one pound book and a four pound book is often much greater on international shipments and domestic Priority Mail shipments than on standard domestic shipments.

Listing services like AbeBooks could borrow an idea from Chrislands, a service that hosts online bookstores (including Using Books). The shipping matrix on Chrislands-hosted sites allows sellers to set a range of shipping rate levels for heavy and oversized items. (I haven’t taken advantage of this feature yet.)

Amazon Marketplace has a built in approach to the problem. Sellers can disallow international or Priority Mail orders on an item-by-item basis, which is more of a dodge than a solution. AbeBooks, Alibris, and Biblio have “request extra charges” features.

Recently announced on Amazon’s seller forums:

Over the next few weeks we will begin displaying the standard domestic shipping cost alongside the price of the item. Buyers will have the option to sort the display of listings either by item and shipping cost combined (this will be the default view) or by item price alone (this is how the page works today).

Very good. I’ll applaud all attempts to make shipping charges more transparent.

This affects Amazon’s non-media categories, where some sellers have more leeway in setting shipping rates, more than it does books, CDs, and movies. But Amazon does explicitly mention an aspect of this change that might be slightly controversial to their Marketplace sellers:

Products that are sold or fulfilled by Amazon may qualify for “Super Saver Shipping” or the “Prime” shipping subscription program; accordingly, these items will not display a shipping cost[.]

“Super Saver Shipping” is Amazon’s free shipping offer for orders of over $25. “Prime” is a program that allows customers to upgrade shipping on Amazon-filled orders for a flat annual fee. The affect of this is that listings for items that are shipped from Amazon’s warehouses will sometimes receive better placement even when the customer’s order won’t qualify for free shipping under the “Super Saver Shipping” program.

I arrived half an hour before the doors opened, earlier than I’d planned. There were a dozen people in line, most of them dealers and book scouts who I recognized. One group of four dealers were chatting together over the stacks of postal tubs they’d brought for hauling books.

A few minutes before opening, the sale’s organizer stepped out of the library (accompanied by a uniformed police officer) and explained the rules of the sale. Dealers should fill one box, he said, then pass it to one of the volunteers before starting on another box. He passed out some labels for people to use on their boxes and went back inside. The doors were opened in short order and everyone rushed into the small meeting room where the sale was being held. Then in a carefully organized fashion, the four dealers who I mentioned before each scooped up a boxload of books from the choice non-fiction tables and shouted, “Full box.” They handed off their filled boxes and, barely glancing at the spines, dumped the next pile of books into their next four boxes. “Full box!”

I’d say that at least two-thirds of the sale’s books were claimed within three minutes. It was entertaining.

After things had settled down, I wandered over to the fiction section — always more hit-and-miss than most non-fiction genres and therefore less appealing to the organized group — and picked out a few books. I noticed that most of the books were almost brand new — published in the last couple of years. This may be a reflection of this affluent suburb’s donor base. Most of the books were likely bought new from end of the aisle displays at Barnes and Noble, read once and donated. (This may be an unfair demographic generalization.)

One of the slash-and-burn dealers (who works at a respectable store in my neighborhood) came over to browse through the fiction. She immediately snipped at a commodity dealer who was hunkered down over his barcode scanner-enabled cell phone scanning ISBNs without glancing at book covers. “You’re the rudest person I’ve ever encountered at one of these book sales,” she said to him. “Me?” he asked, apparently bemused.

This was a bad scene. I paid for my little pile of books and headed back to my side of the lake and made it to the Edmonds Library Book Sale.

My booth mate was Michael Kerstetter of Tall Tales. Michael has an impressive stock of signed first edition science fiction hardcovers. He is a true pro.

Jerry Shepard and Jay Chee were a steady source of conversation. I only chatted briefly with the guys at Modlitbooks, but I admired their eclectic, yet still coherent, collection.

The Old London Bookshop’s booth had some beautiful books and I hope to visit their shop sometime to look through their treasures and pick up some John Buchan.

I didn’t have a lot of time to browse, but would have liked to have a better look at the travel and exploration books at the booths on the back wall of the front room.

I also chatted with non-exhibiting booksellers Catherine O’Toole and the folks behind Brick Road Books, and was happy to have a good conversation with Jamie from Twice Sold Tales.

I owe thanks to the show’s organizers, my neighbor Louis Collins and my neighbor at the Fair David Gregor. I’ve heard good things about David Gregor’s bookselling seminar and hope to take it soon.