News

White Plains, NY, April 2, 2001 . . . Trafalgar Square, the leading U.S. distributor of British publishers for over 25 years, and PubEasy, The Global Publishing e-Marketplace, announced today that Trafalgar Square has launched their PubEasy/EXCHANGE™ web site.

PubEasy/EXCHANGE™ is a hosted PubEasy service that enables small and medium sized publishers, distributors and wholesalers to join PubEasy and provide a full featured e-commerce ordering and inquiry web site to their bookselling customers.

Booksellers now have online access through PubEasy’s/EXCHANGE™ to Trafalgar Square’s hosted site for title, price and availability information, electronic order placement, and e-Catalog access. Trafalgar Square currently handles over 9,000 active titles from 36 British-based publishers covering many diverse subject areas. Major British publishers distributed by Trafalgar Square in the U.S. include Random House, HarperCollins, Little Brown, Penguin, Bloomsbury, Orion, Hodder Headline and many others.

In addition, Trafalgar Square publishes its own list of titles in the areas of horses and horsemanship, crafts and home decorating, gardening and flower arranging, and mind, body, spirit.

Publishers and distributors who join PubEasy/EXCHANGE™ instantly access the network of over 5,100 booksellers from 100 countries to offer 24-hour/7-day ordering and inquiry customer self-service via the Internet. The hosted server environment is simple to implement and maintain, and can improve sales, marketing reach and improve customer service to booksellers worldwide.

"Enhancing all aspects of our service to our customers is a key strategic goal for Trafalgar Square," commented Paul Feldstein, Managing Director. "PubEasy/EXCHANGE™ provided a fast, affordable solution which enables us to launch a global Internet-based service to our customers while minimizing the costs typically associated with building an e-commerce site."

Peter F. Clifton, Chief Executive Officer of PubEasy stated, "The launch of the Trafalgar Square PubEasy/EXCHANGE™ site provides booksellers with easy access to the impressive group of publishers distributed by Trafalgar. We are pleased to have them join PubEasy through our new hosted /EXCHANGE".

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PubEasy™, the Global Publishing e-Marketplace, represents the new standard in e-commerce for the global bookselling industry. More than 5,100 booksellers in 100+ countries spanning North America, Europe and Asia are using PubEasy to facilitate access to order placement, order tracking, price, title and availability data over the Internet with participating publishers, distributors and wholesalers, more quickly and cost-effectively. Booksellers with a PubEasy password can directly access any participating Affiliate website on the network. The service is available via the Internet twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

In the US, "live" Affiliates include HarperCollins, Random House, Inc., National Book Network and Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC. Other US Affiliate web sites scheduled to launch include AIDC, Broadman & Holman, and Chronicle Books.

In Canada, HarperCollins Canada is scheduled to launch a PubEasy web site.

In the UK, PubEasy Affiliates include HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., Macmillan Distribution Ltd., Penguin UK, TBS/Grantham Book Services, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Gardners Books, Littlehampton Book Services, Marston Book Services, Bookpoint (Hodder Headline) and Airlift Book Company. ITPS is scheduled to launch a PubEasy website.

PubEasy/EXCHANGE™ is the new hosted service for small publishers, distributors and wholesalers.

To access PubEasy, booksellers need a single PubEasy 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.