November 10, 2003

Shelf Life

The ASLA Bookstore on the EXPO Floor in New Orleans

ASLA's new website design offers even speedier navigation to all your favorite browsing points on asla.org, including the Landscape Architecture Bookstore--easily the most significant improvement for Shelf Life readers. On the main page, draw your cursor over the Products & Services heading to reveal a dropdown menu where the Bookstore appears quite modestly alongside several other compelling choices.

Although this faster track to the Bookstore will tickle ASLA's bibliophiles, an even more significant development awaits your discovery: our newly implemented affiliate program with John Wiley & Sons Publishers. On the asla.org side of this program, we list Wiley titles in multiple categories of interest to landscape architects in their various specialties, from Biography and History to Urban Planning and Design.

On the Wiley side of the program, any purchase made after clicking through to the Wiley website from asla.org not only earns you a discount of not less that 15% from Wiley's retail prices, but it also helps ASLA earn a commission on the sale. This discount and commission arrangement applies to the purchase of any Wiley title--including those ubiquitous "For Dummies" books and Frommer's portable travel guide series (why not order one now for next year's annual meeting in Utah?). Please remember that if you go directly to Wiley without going through asla.org, you will lose the discount and ASLA will not benefit from a commission.

If you attended ASLA's annual meeting and Expo in New Orleans, and if you visited the Landscape Architecture Bookstore there on the Expo floor, you may have noticed our table devoted to Wiley publications. To highlight the diversity of subjects available, Wiley sent us display copies of several titles that weren't offered for sale. In most cases, our shoppers' disappointment at not having these books available for immediate purchase was balanced by knowing they are readily available at a discount through the new program.

Inventory returning from the annual meeting will undergo processing at our customer service center over the next several days. Some of those items, including New York Botanical Garden 2004 Engagement Calendars and keynote speaker Steve Thomas' The Last Navigator, will soon appear on the Bookstore's online Sale Table. That's a good option to remember as the approaching end of the year brings opportunities to send gifts to family, friends, clients, and bookstore managers.