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PUBEASY.COM ESTABLISHES BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS COMMUNITY FOR WELSH BOOKSELLERS

Welsh and Welsh interest consumers to order books from new website that refers sales to participating bookstores

Somerset, NJ, February 22, 2000 . . . PubEasy.com, the global Internet inquiry and ordering service, together with The Welsh Book Council launched a new satellite community Business-to-Business (B2B) website consisting of online access to the Welsh Book Council’s database of over 15,000 Welsh and Welsh interest titles with embedded links to send orders directly to participating booksellers.

Funded by the National Assembly of Wales and the European Economic Community, the site is available at www.gwales.com. Any consumer interested in books or periodicals in the Welsh language or books and periodicals in English but of Welsh (including Celtic) interest can go to gwales.com to search for titles, author and imprints as well as options including illustrator, editor, publication date range, age groups, key word content and subject codes. Once a consumer finds a book that they would like to purchase, the consumer is presented with a list of bookstores that stock the book and then places the order with the bookstore of their choice.

"This is a great step forward for e-commerce in Wales," said Pedr ap Llwyd, Deputy Director at the Welsh Books Council. "Consumers all over the world, schools, bookshops and libraries can come online and conduct business with the publishing community in Wales. We chose to work with PubEasy.com on this because the PubEasy.com system contained many options that we wanted to implement and many more that we had not even considered. PubEasy.com has responded to our needs in helping to customize this site. It has been a great partnership."

"This was an interesting and exciting project to be involved in," said Peter F. Clifton, CEO of PubEasy.com. "We were able to extend some of our tools and technologies to accommodate a language other than English and also allow for general consumer orders to promote bookselling in Wales."

PubEasy.com, winner of the Xerox sponsored Innovator of the Year British Book Award, is the Internet inquiry and ordering service which represents the new standard in e-commerce for the global bookselling industry. More than 2,000 booksellers from over 90 countries spanning the UK, Europe, North America 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 or the Whitaker UK bibliographic site.

The service is free to booksellers and is available via the Internet 24 hours a day, 7-days a week.

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 and Plymbridge Distributors are scheduled to launch PubEasy.com websites over the coming months.

US Affiliate websites scheduled to launch include: AIDC, Broadman & Holman, NatioAirlift Book Company is scheduled to launch a PubEasy.com website in the coming months.nal Book Network (the second largest US book distributor) and Von Holtzbrinck Publishing Services (Henry Holt, St. Martin's Press and Farrar Straus & Giroux).

To access PubEasy.com, booksellers require a password, a computer with a Web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later) and an Internet connection. Login to http://www.pubeasy.com and click the 'Register' button to obtain a user ID and password.

PubEasy.com^TM is a registered trademark of VISTA Computer Services, Inc.

PubEasy.com is a subsidiary of VISTA Computer Services, Inc.

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To access PubEasy.com, all booksellers need is a computer, a Web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later) and an Internet connection. Login to http://www.pubeasy.com and click the 'Register' button to obtain a user ID and password.