Yet another perl script pulls out the new titles and saves them in another file like the current items listing I just talked about. Now the users can search through this file and add new titles to their subscription. There is a two week window each month from when we get the data and the catalogs to the time our customers can add anything from the catalogs to their subscription. After two weeks we make our order to the distributor, so I delete the new titles file, and the menus detect this and no longer let customers add new stuff, so only the current old titles are available after the 15th. I set up a dumb serial terminal in the front of the store and wrote some menus that would let customers edit their subscription file.
Customers can add titles from the distributors' listings or from a list of popular titles.
This way a customer cannot add a title we can not get, but he can change the number of each title or the starting and ending issue numbers, as well as delete a title. We have been using this system for nearly two years, and we now have over 200 subscribers managing over 1800 subscriptions on-line with Linux. The competition Last spring I attended a major comic book trade show for comic book store owners. One of the speakers sold software that could be used to maintain comic book subscriptions. I asked him if he could support customers making changes to their own subscription.