As a result of the USA's Homeland Security increasing its anti-terrorism measures, some packages going from the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland) to the USA may be subject to additional delays. This particularly applies to packages weighing over 500gms. The United Kingdom's Royal Mail has stated on its website that this means that such packages which "would normally be sent by passenger aircraft must now travel by other means, including ships and cargo planes." Inevitably, this will lead to some delays in US customers receiving books ordered from UK booksellers. We apologise in advance for any delays, which are beyond the control of UK booksellers.

For further information please refer to Royal Mail's International incident bulletin

Currently all our members can send a file called DAILY_DELETES.[xxx] to our WBM server, and this file will be automatically treated (as its name implies) as a deletes-only file and processed as such.

Mostly this is used by our WBM-BB database users, where a single-click button automatically extracts all books in the current upload queue marked as "Sold/Delete" (i.e. Quantity = 0) and sends these as a single "interim" file automatically named DAILY_DELETES.tab to our server. This enables our database users to fire off each day's (or each hour's) Sold records in automated fashion, without mixing in other books listed For Sale which might be only half-completed, or not yet checked/proofed etc, and has proven a most popular feature for our members.

We will, with the new software release November 1st, now automatically detect those files marked or called DAILY_DELETES and process them INSTANTLY UPON RECEIPT, so that sending a small file of recently sold books will see them disappear at once from our system, instead of being placed in processing queue which can sometimes take a few hours before being activated (as happens at most other listing sites as well).

DATABASE COMPATIBILITY ASPECT FOR THIS TOOL: These features will be available in equal form to users of ALL databases currently uploading to the WBM.

In addition to instant processing of these regular housekeeping files from our Members, our fileserver will now also create an INSTANT forward of that DAILY_DELETES file to all of a Member's sites included in our automatic data-forwarding-to-multiple sites system.

The only overhead thus remaining in the forwarding of a single Sold/Delete or daily (or hourly) grouping of them will be whatever time it takes the receiving site (e.g. ABE, Biblio etc) to process those received files, which will be forwarded to them within seconds of receipt by us (provided they are named according to the above convention i.e. DAILY_DELETES or DAILY_DELETES_2 etc - anything AFTER the "DAILY_DELETES" will not affect this instant all-sites forwarding system.

I will be contacting each of the major sites shortly to suggest that they accept this naming convention (and offer it to all their existing members who are NOT WBM Members as well) and introduce the same sort of instant processing rather than file-queuing at their end of things. Some sites at least will respond positively to this, which will (for those that do) provide an instant multi-listing delete listings option which will trigger at WBM and foreign-site end almost simultaneously, and provide an important new listings management tool for those using the system.

DATABASE COMPATIBILITY ASPECT FOR THIS TOOL: These features will be available in equal form to users of ALL databases currently uploading to the WBM.

This has been completely over-hauled by an excellent professional web design team, and will be launched simultaneous with the software upgrades above-mentioned.

Apart from a lovely new "look and feel" (to which all existing members have had the opportunity of creative and highly useful input) the new website will boast significantly enhanced functionality and power including all the new tools and routines above-mentioned.

A new feature of our Website will an attached Bookseller Newspaper (on public display, not for Members only) which will carry a wide range of bookselling news and views, and a growing calendar of upcoming bookseller-relevant events. There will be a public-access Submit Page for anyone browsing the online newspaper to submit articles, letters/views, upcoming bookseller events, and bookseller-useful links to other sites - any such material submitted from any source will be routed through to the page's Editor for consideration for next month's issue.

Our Member John Lewis of John & Pearl Books in Cornwall has volunteered to act as initial Editor of our On-line Bookseller Newspaper, and a good many other of our bookseller members are likely to provide a continuous stream of interesting articles, data and other material to this website attachment.

One major and noteworthy upgrade which will be seen at the new release is an overhauled Multi-Tier Shipping Matrix page, which has been requested by our Member Bill Singleton in the UK. This will enable more complex settings of domestic shipping rates to permit of both economy and priority levels, and will be particularly useful for our UK members (to which area the issues concerned are largely confined).

The new bookselling website will also see the first (small) steps involved in our massive project to create auto-sub-categorisation, although the huge amount of research and planning involved in the final implementation of this system (designed for site browsers rather than searchers) will not unfold in its full glory until 2011.

DATABASE COMPATIBILITY ASPECT FOR THIS TOOL: These features will be available in equal form to users of ALL databases currently uploading to the WBM.

This is one of many regular upgrades to our database engine (which is supplied free to those members who want to convert to it), but this particular one will be a fairly major overhaul, and will officially become version 7.05.01 upgrading from 7.04.13.

Main features of this bookseller database upgrade are: