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Some News and History from the Computing Bookshop

Roger Woolnough , IT/User Support


Abstract

How did the Computing Bookshop start.


The bookshop began modestly in 1994 with the vision of providing up to date documentation for users who were moving towards Unix and C++. It began as an off-shoot of the stores where new books were quickly bought but it took time to replace them. It was quickly clear that this type of service was well received by users and despite in the first year only having an agreement with what was Addison Wesley we managed sales of 350 books.

What started as a small operation quickly grew as we saw the need to add new publishers. In 1996 we were 23rd in European sales for Addison Wesley and 11th for O'Reilly. Remember we had no shop, just shelving in what was the defunct 'User Consultancy Office', and books were just in piles for people to buy as required. The thought of a 30-45% discount was also a reason for good sales. Notwithstanding this here are a few interesting facts :

  1. The best selling book we have is written by a CERN staff member, Michel Goossens, "The Latex Companion" with almost 3000 copies sold!
  2. The quickest selling book was the first Java book ever produced: we sold 200 in 2 weeks!
  3. We have little demand for French books but sold 350 copies of "Word et Excel Comment faire..." in 2 months in 1998.
  4. Our legacy to the World is that since publishing companies have seen our success, some now propose similar arrangements to large corporations.

By 1997 we were selling up to 3000 books per year and the people working at the uco could not do two jobs at once, sell books and provide support! With the closure of the Computer Science Library (CSL) we were lucky to start anew with a proper bookshop in 513-1-022 and Jutta Megies the librarian from the CSL taking over the day to day running.

In the last 4 years we have sales of between 2500 and 3000 books per annum and have added to our stock of computing titles with dictionaries and a small library of physics books, some sold in conjunction with the CERN Reception in Building 33. We try to offer a selected choice of specialised books but are always pleased to hear from users when they have 'tips' for new titles. We like to think of the shop as a service for the user's with a choice steered by themselves and current CERN computing policy.

Since the last CNL we have created a new account with Hungry Minds. This used to be IDG books, famous for their Bible series. These books have always sold well as they provide a tutorial and reference in one book and are extremely complete on individual subjects. We have a full range in stock for Office 2000 Applications and more and we invite you to scan the stock list for more details.

Other new books available include two new O'Reilly titles, "SQL in a nutshell" and "SSH the definitive guide". One title has been withdrawn by this publisher ("Building linux clusters") as it contained some wrong information and is now being rewritten. Two other books of interest are now available "C++ Standard Template Library" and "Adobe Framemaker 6, Classroom in a Book".

We would like to thank all our clients for their kind remarks and their custom over the years and we look forward to improving the service for you still further in the future. Please get in touch with us if you have information on new titles that could be interesting to purchase, by writing to Bookshop@cern.ch.



For matters related to this article please contact the author.
Cnl.Editor@cern.ch


CERN-CNL-2001-001
Vol. XXXVI, issue no 1


Last Updated on Thu Apr 05 15:28:12 CEST 2001.
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