Trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis will make booksellers forget their tired feet when he plays a special benefit concert on Saturday, June 2, during BookExpo America. He will also be helping raise money for the Book Industry Foundation, which will donate the proceeds to ABFFE and the Association of American Publishers' Get Caught Reading campaign.

	Special Marsalis Concert Offer -- for ABFFE Members Only Murderous Media? BEA Panel Examines Media Violence Two ABFFE Silent Auctions to Offer Big Savings, Beginning May 25 Previous ABFFE Updates

Millions of Americans discovered during the recent Ken Burn's "Jazz" series on PBS that Marsalis, the leader of the Lincoln Center Jazz Band, is a charming and articulate spokesman for jazz. The concert begins at 10 p.m. in the Imperial Ballroom of the Fairmount Hotel. The concert is co-sponsored by the Book Industry Foundation and Da Capo Press, the publisher of Marsalis' new book, "Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life." Da Capo is a member of the Perseus Books Group.

Tickets are $25 and may be ordered as part of the registration packet or purchased in the registration area at the McCormick Place Convention Center.

Special Marsalis Concert Offer -- for ABFFE Members Only

ABFFE members who attend the Marsalis concert will be eligible to receive a free poster. On Sunday, bring your ticket stub to ABFFE's Good Foundation store at McCormick Place and choose either ABFFE's new "Burning Books" poster or a poster of this year's BookExpo convention art, Picasso's "Woman Reading." It's our way of saying, "Thanks for your support!"

Murderous Media? BEA Panel Examines Media Violence

In 1999, BookExpo America met in the shadow of one of the nation's most shattering tragedies -- the shootings at Columbine High School. At this year's BEA, bestselling authors Richard Rhodes and Sara Paretsky will join a panel of experts in examining one of the legacies of the Columbine shootings -- the growing demand for the censorship of media violence. ABFFE will sponsor the panel, "Murderous Media? The Debate over Regulating Media Violence," which will be held on Saturday, June 2, at 4 p.m.

The ABFFE panel will explore several issues at the heart of the media violence controversy. Are legal limits on media violence justified? Is it possible to restrict "gratuitous" violence without banning works that possess socially redeeming value? If restrictions on media will not help, what are some of the other ways of fighting violence and what can booksellers do to help?

Moderated by Paretsky, the author of the V.I. Warshawski mysteries, the ABFFE panel will feature a distinguished group of experts on the problem of violence. Rhodes has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The author most recently of "Why They Kill," he is a strong critic of those who argue that there is scientific evidence linking media violence to real violence. Dr. Brian L. Wilcox, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will argue that media violence has been proven to be harmful.

The other two members of the panel will be Ginger Rhodes and Dr. Carl Bell. Ms. Rhodes is a graduate student in clinical psychology who is studying violent offenders at a medium security prison in Connecticut and has begun developing a therapy program to reduce or reverse violent behavior. Dr. Bell is a psychiatrist and the president of Community Mental Health Council and Foundation, a comprehensive community mental health center on Chicago's Southside. He has specialized in the problems of adolescents who witness violence.

The panel, which will be co-sponsored by Freedom to Read Foundation and the Association of American Publishers' Freedom to Read Committee, will be held in in Room S503B of the McCormick Convention Center.

Two ABFFE Silent Auctions to Offer Big Savings, Beginning May 25

Every spring, the ABFFE Silent Auction offers booksellers extraordinary savings on a wide assortment of items for your stores -- and yourselves. Once again this year, ABFFE will run both a "paper and pen" auction at BookExpo America and an online auction that is hosted on the ABFFE Web site. The online auction kicks off on May 25. A week later, ABFFE will open the "paper and pen" auction in the main lobby of the McCormick Center in Chicago. The BEA auction features different items than the online auction and concludes at noon on June 3, the last day of the show.

Most of the items in the ABFFE Silent Auctions contribute to the bookseller's bottom line. There are bargains on books from both leading publishers and independent presses. (Winners pay no shipping costs, adding to the big savings they realize on many choice titles.)

There are also a number of sidelines, a variety of bookstore services and a number of Internet resources, including Baker & Taylor's Title Source II and Ingram's iPage. The Internet services range in price from $1,750 to $2,180, which means that winning bidders can save hundreds of dollars on these innovative products.

Many items are just for fun, including two airline tickets to anywhere in the continental United States, tickets to jazz concerts, baseball games, movie studio tours and amusement parks. There are also an assortment of audio and video DVD's and even video games.

Don't miss the savings–or the fun!

Previously in ABFFE Update