Lorem Ipsum Books began as a comfortable place to browse and purchase useful books. Since we opened in 2003, our bookstore has become the centerpiece of a much larger cause. Our storefront, which is operated with the help of software we created specifically for small bookstores, now showcases our fierce commitment to book technology and to the future of independent retail.



But when we started out, our goals were much simpler.

In our Cambridge neighborhood, both local bookstores had just gone out of business, and the Inman Square community felt their lack. Lorem Ipsum was created to satisfy a basic need: every neighborhood should have an independent bookstore, with all of the benefits of a locally owned and operated business—from knowledgeable staff, to personalized inventory, to a forum for community-building. Mindful of the realities faced by independent businesses in today’s market, we needed to find a way to turn our small bookstore into a viable enterprise.

The Ka-Zam software is an invention of necessity whose ultimate goal is nothing short of saving the independent bookstore by incorporating technological innovation into the small business model. (We’re not exaggerating! Visit our website: Save The BookStore Save The World.com). Lorem Ipsum Books became the test case and inspiration for the Ka-Zam Bookseller software, which is our answer to the challenges faced by independent retailers in today’s increasingly corporatized, online book market. Ka-Zam is the infrastructure that supports daily operations at Lorem Ipsum Books and not only allows us to provide a space for books—a community location that fosters literary discussion and promotes reading—but integrates a set of technologically savvy tools that streamlines our bookselling enterprise and makes us a competitive business. In short, we believe that Ka-Zam changes what it means to be a small bookstore.

We may have lofty long-term aspirations for our bookstore and for Ka-Zam, but we still have a business to run! Like any other bookseller, we need to catalogue our inventory, conduct point-of-sale transactions, fill orders, and receive books. We also need to be able to locate our inventory in a pinch and know how to price our stock so that we can remain competitive, particularly in the online market. When it comes to these everyday needs, Ka-Zam allows us to operate our store smoothly because it is designed to help perform these daily tasks in the most efficient ways possible.

Lorem Ipsum’s inventory is catalogued into three physical locations: storefront, basement, and warehouse. Basically, we use Ka-Zam to enter books into each of these locations based on demand—we put the best and most popular books into the individual sections in our store and the rest are catalogued into numbered bins in our basement or warehouse. Each of our books is stickered with a unique inventory number, so when we look it up, we know exactly where to find it (which location and which shelf or bin). So, when a customer asks if we have a particular title, or if we get an email about a specific edition of a book, we immediately know where to find that book by searching for it our Ka-Zam inventory. If we find a book out of place, we use the bar-coded sticker on the back cover to find out where it was shelved—but we can also quickly see how long we’ve had the book, who entered it into our system, from whom it was purchased, and how we’ve priced it on our various seller websites.

When we sell a book, we scan its barcode into the register function in Ka-Zam, and conduct our point-of-sale transactions through our own software. So, we enter payment information (including credit cards), print receipts, give discounts, redeem customized gift certificates, and associate purchases with customer profiles, so our customers can keep track of which books they bought when or can redeem accrued store credit during a purchase. All of these functions are localized and integrated into Ka-Zam, so we easily can keep track of sales by type, location, genre, etc.

Since Lorem Ipsum sells mostly used books, we purchase a lot of books during the course of a week. Ka-Zam allows us to organize these purchases into customer “buy queues,” so we can keep track of how much we pay for each book and each queue, but we can also quickly enter entire queues into our warehouse or basement. When we enter books individually, we create a detailed description of the condition of the book, which is uploaded to our online seller accounts as soon as the book is entered. Our inventory is for sale online and in our store, and any customer browsing our website or shopping for a book on Alibris, Amazon, ABE, Biblio, etc. has access to the details of each book entry. One of the best advantages of Ka-Zam is that it helps our staff price each book according to the current market. During the entry process, we see a snapshot of a book’s average selling price with various distributors; this allows us to gauge our own price and to set minimum prices for books we don’t want to sell for a penny!

All of our online sales are emailed directly to Ka-Zam, so we start each business day by filling these orders, which are consolidated into one easy location. In other words, we don’t have to log into our various seller accounts to fill orders; Ka-Zam automatically uploads them and communicates with the distributor site once we have completed the order. Every online transaction we conduct automatically updates our Ka-Zam inventory on our seller websites. So, a book that we sold three minutes ago will no longer be available online. Internally, we can track the sales channel of a particular title, and we know to whom a book was shipped, through which seller account, and on what date.

We also use Ka-Zam to ship orders. Once we’ve located and packaged an order, we go through a set of steps to remove it from our inventory, which include weighing it on a scale that is connected to our computer. Ka-Zam communicates with Dazzle/Endicia and prints a label for the correct postage. Again, since all of these processes are consolidated into Ka-Zam, we don’t have to log into our postage program or use a separate printer for our postage. We just attach the label and send the book on its way.

We have designed Ka-Zam to make the small bookseller a more efficient, technologically innovative, and competitive business. Lorem Ipsum Books illustrates how this software improves everyday business operations on the small scale. As a means to bolster independent business, Ka-Zam can support a worldwide community of small booksellers, all working through one consolidated network. As our name suggests, Ka-Zam hopes to swoop in and make the world a better place for independent bookstores.