defis.r52.ru was the website of Defis, a book-trading firm operating in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru and listed in the nn.ru catalog directory under the description "Wholesale book trade." It was a single-page business card for a wholesale book supplier: the firm presented itself as having worked in the book market since 1992 and as "one of the leading enterprises of wholesale trade," supplying books "not only in its own region, but also in other regions of Russia and the near abroad"[1]. The copyright notice on the page read "© 2000 Defis"[1]; the surviving snapshots of the home page span 2001–2004[2].
What the site looked like
The surviving text of the home page fits on a single screen and does not change from snapshot to snapshot: the page captured by the web archive on April 1, 2001[1] and the page from May 12, 2004[2] match word for word, down to the 2000 copyright notice. There was no catalog, shopping cart, or price-list search on the home page — orders were meant to be placed off-site.
The page title was "Defis Book-Trading Firm," and the page ended with a pun-slogan: "The right way to spell it is through a hyphen [defis]"[1]. At the bottom was the developer's credit: "Web design by Teamoty Brane Inc."[1]. The surviving text of the home page contains no postal address or telephone number with a city code — the means of contact are listed only in general terms: as the home page put it, the firm accepted "orders by email, fax, telephone, or in person"[1]. No visitor counters are visible in the saved text of the page either.
What the firm offered wholesale buyers
Most of the page was taken up by a commercial pitch full of numbers. Defis called itself a representative of more than 120 publishers and claimed to hold in stock more than 20,000 book titles: fiction, including children's books; reference, encyclopedic, and educational literature; gift editions and books on art, philosophy, and psychology; textbooks and educational-methodological literature; business, legal, and specialized literature; miniature editions and postcards[1]. As the home page stated, it had "more than 250" clients, including "large wholesale firms from other cities"[1].
Next came a list of ten reasons "why it is worth working with us": a wide assortment, a flexible system of discounts and payment deferrals, replenishment and renewal of the assortment 2–3 times a week, free delivery of books to the customer, prompt delivery to other cities by road and rail, regularly updated information on the web page, mailing of price lists by email, acceptance of orders by email, fax, telephone, and in person, a system for ordering books not in the price list, individual work with clients, and special offers[1].
The composition of the list is telling: here the internet is not a storefront but a channel for distributing price lists and taking orders, on a par with fax. The promise of "regularly updated information on the Web page"[1] is at odds with what the snapshots show: over more than three years the text of the home page did not change by a single word[2]. It was likely not the site itself that was updated, but the price list, which was mailed out separately.
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
The site belongs to that layer of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet made up of corporate business cards on third-level regional domains: the firm obtained an address in the form defis.r52.ru in the Nizhny Novgorod zone r52.ru, and visibility was provided by the nn.ru catalog, where Defis was listed in the goods category with the description "Wholesale book trade."
The firm was not a notable participant in local internet life. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating, on which our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is based, the address defis.r52.ru does not appear, and we have no data on its traffic. The surviving results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote also contains no line for this site[3] — either it was not nominated for the competition or it did not receive enough votes to make the final table.
How it closed
The last snapshot of the home page in our web-archive sample is dated May 12, 2004[2]; our material contains no later versions of the page. As of this survey, the domain defis.r52.ru no longer exists: the address is not served, no content is returned from it, and no successor to the site has been recorded.
Our materials say nothing about the further fate of the book-trading firm itself: the page outlived itself as an advertising flyer that had not been updated since 2000, and disappeared along with the domain. Of the wholesale book supplier that had worked since 1992 and claimed 20,000 titles in stock[1], only this text remains on the web.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)