Slovenian bookstores

Some visionaries have been announcing for some time that the electronic media will soon clean up the press, announcing paperless offices, and books as we know them today will become a laughing matter. The media that is supposed to replace books is, in their view, either CDs or the internet.

And yet, all of us who have ever tried to read something longer on a computer screen know that books will remain in use and there is no indication that this could change any time soon. We are also reminded of this by the fact that when we buy a software package, we take home a large pile of books, which, if the visionaries were right, we would no longer need. Books on the web are thus moving into the future, but not in every sense of the word. There are already many bookstores on the web, and recently they have started to appear in large numbers in our country as well. An online bookstore is a place where you enter with the help of a browser, walk between headlines, look at the covers, read the summaries, then choose what you want, and in a few days you get your order home (in paper form, of course). I looked at six Slovenian network points where it is possible to select and order books, and immediately at the beginning I found out that in most cases these are publishers that offer their titles via the internet. This is already one of the serious limitations, as in classic bookstores we are usually not limited to the title of a single publisher.

Mladinska knjiga (WWW.MKZ-LJ.SI)
Mladinska knjiga is certainly the best organized and transparent electronic bookstore in our country. In fact, we should expand the name to “electronic bookstore and paper mill”, because in addition to books you can also order magazines (of course only Gea, Pisani list and Ciciban), office supplies, music and computer CDs, toys, greeting cards, maps… Search modules by catalogs are solid, you can search by thematic sections, by collections, titles and authors. You can choose to see headlines with summaries, only headlines or full-page presentations with a cover image (or a teddy bear if you want one). What you want to buy, simply mark and at the end the program kindly lists the selected items and serves you with the final price of all the items you have selected. Then enter your details and the purchase is made. Payment by card is not available, but since this is a rather risky practice these days, it’s not a bad thing. You will pay upon delivery. A very interesting option that I haven’t spotted anywhere else is “notice”. Here you can choose the topic you are interested in and the publisher will inform you via e-mail about all the news regarding the chosen topic. Commendable! Since all the books are Slovenian, the unfinished English version of the page doesn’t bother me too much.