News

The Random House/PubEasy.com web site now provides booksellers around the world with free access to title, price and availability information, order placement and order status checking over the Internet twenty-four hours a day, seven days-a-week for the frontlist and backlist titles from all Random House, Inc. USA publishing divisions and imprints.

"PubEasy.com is an important business tool for Random House’s new Customer Operations Department," said Doug Masto, Vice President, Field Sales Customer Operations. "We are pleased to now offer our bookselling customers a way to leverage the Internet to make routine inquiries, place orders, receive acknowledgements and track the status of their orders."

Random House Inc., founded in 1925, is the world's largest English-language general trade book publisher. It includes an array of prestigious imprints that publish some of the foremost writers of our time--in hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, audio, multimedia, and other formats. Random House, Inc is a division of the Bertelsmann Book Group of Bertelsmann AG, one of the foremost media companies in the world.

PubEasy.com™, winner of the 1999 Xerox Publishing Innovator of the Year Award, is the Internet inquiry and ordering service that represents the new standard in e-commerce for the global bookselling industry. More than 3,000 booksellers from over 95countries spanning North America, Europe and Asia are using the service to access title, price and availability information, to place orders, to check the status of their orders and to access catalogs from participating publishers, distributors and wholesalers. Booksellers with a PubEasy.com password can directly access any participating Affiliate website on the network. The service is free to booksellers and is available via the Internet twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

In the US, Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC recently launched its PubEasy.com site. Forthcoming US Affiliates include: AIDC, Broadman & Holman and National Book Network (the second largest US book distributor).

In the UK, Macmillan Distribution Ltd., Marston Book Services, Exel Logistics, Bookpoint (Hodder Headline), TBS/Grantham Book Services and J. Whitaker & Sons provided early support and endorsement of PubEasy.com. Participation from the bookselling industry continues to grow, with recent Affiliate sites launched by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Gardners Books, Penguin UK, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. and Littlehampton Book Services. Airlift Book Company is scheduled to launch a PubEasy.com website in the coming months.

To access PubEasy.com, booksellers require a password, a computer with a Web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer 4.0 or later) and an Internet connection. Login to http://www.pubeasy.com and click the 'Register' button to obtain a user ID and password.

# # #