99 + 1

Dear all,

So we’ve reached the 99^th bookstore and thus we are posting this instead of the 100^th one. We’ve started this guide some two and a half months ago and little did we know that only a short while after, we would already have a rather voluminous database of bookstores in Europe. The idea originated as a combination of two elements – our passion for books and our passion for traveling. These two come together in our habit of visiting local bookstores whenever we find ourselves in a new city. At first we thought that we could make a guide to bookstores throughout the whole wide world – of course, back then it was just an idea, a nucleus around which we built this website.

Later on we realized that even if we narrow our focus to Europe, the project still remains very ambitious and its success depends largely on the contribution of the visitors of our website. Luckily, we were fortunate enough to have you to help us. Therefore, we would like to thank all the people who have recommended the bookstores. See, the idea wasn’t just to flick through the pages on the internet and post about bookstores that we’ve accidentally stumbled upon. No, we needed real recommendations from real people in order to fulfill our task. Some people said that it was too ambitious and that no one would be interested in such a guide. It’s not that we didn’t care but we were determined enough to do such a thing because we ourselves have had troubles finding bookstores in cities throughout Europe.

So after spending hours and hours posting on various forums asking for your help, after consuming even more hours trying to crack some complicated HTML codes in order to make the site more appealing to the eye (well, they seemed complicated enough for the HTML laics such as we are.. or were?), we’ve come to this point in the life of our Bookstore Guide where we can say that we are actually pleased with what we have accomplished. Just a day ago, we bought our own domain (http://www.bookstoreguide.org) in order to make it easier to access. Oh, and it also seems more professional – although it shall always remain ‘an amateur guide to book shopping’.

Anyway, not to take too much of your time, we would, once again, like to thank all of you who have helped us – from people recommending us bookstores to people/websites that were kind enough to write about us and/or link back to our website. We would like to thank people who have commented on bookstores and at the same time we’d like to remind you to continue doing that (if you feel that there is something we didn’t say about the bookstore but could have). Also, we are still more than open to all of your recommendations, links, suggestions, feedback, etc. for we plan to stay here for a long long long time to come.

Yours,

Sonja and Ivan

The Bookstore Guide Team