knigi.r52.ru was the website of Parol NN, a Nizhny Novgorod book-trading company, hosted in the local Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru. According to the home page, the firm was founded in 1992, and its wholesale warehouse was located "in the center of Nizhny Novgorod"[1]. By the late 2000s the site represented OOO Parol NN and its retail chain "CHITAINA" ("READERIA"), described on the home page as "one of the largest in the Nizhny Novgorod region"[2]. According to the Wayback Machine's index, captures of the address go back to December 2001, with the last snapshot dated April 21, 2012.

Wholesale warehouse and retail chain

In the version of the site preserved in August 2004, the entire home page fit into a few lines about the company's structure. The firm was divided into two parts — a wholesale warehouse and a retail sales network[1]. Of the wholesale warehouse's stock it was said that it held "over 10,000 book titles in steady demand among the public," and about purchasing that the company worked "with all the major publishers and book-trading firms in the country"[1].

The menu consisted of five items: "Home," "Discounts," "Price List," "Order," "Address"[1]. The set is typical of a wholesale book site of that time: there is no storefront of covers and no shopping cart, only a downloadable price list and an order form. The address and phone number themselves are not given in the surviving text of the home page — they were on a separate page that is absent from this set of archived snapshots. At the bottom stood a copyright notice, "(c) 2002 Parol NN," and a credit for the contractor — "programming and design by CHiS"[1]. The date in the copyright notice is two years older than the snapshot itself: the page had not been redone by August 2004.

"CHITAINA": the retail chain's website

A snapshot from January 31, 2009 shows a different site with a different purpose. The page title is "About the store: OOO 'Parol NN'," and the company is presented as the managing company for the book-trading chain "CHITAINA"[2]. The wholesale theme was gone from the home page, replaced by a story about the stores: "books, stationery, and related goods, the most sought-after and popular, at affordable prices," "a fair and clear system of discounts via loyalty cards" for regular customers[2].

The figures had changed too. Whereas in 2004 the talk was of a warehouse stock of just over ten thousand titles, now "the overall assortment includes more than 50,000 product titles," and the speed of deliveries was explained by "having its own logistics complex in Nizhny Novgorod" (the typo "logistichesky" is from the original)[2]. The company's age was presented as an argument for reliability: "16 years of impeccable reputation of the managing company 'Parol NN' in its relations with partners in the book market" — counting from the stated founding year of 1992[2]. The home page ended with a phrase about its mission: "popularizing the most useful of pastimes — READING!"[2].

The menu, meanwhile, had become shorter than before: only "About the store" and "Contacts" remained, without the price list or order form[2]. Online trading never appeared on knigi.r52.ru: in both 2004 and 2009 it was a business card for an offline company, not a shop. There are no visit counters in the surviving text of either snapshot's home page.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The third-level domain in the r52.ru zone directly links the site to the Nizhny Novgorod Internet: addresses of the form name.r52.ru were issued to local organizations — firms, educational institutions, editorial offices. The address knigi.r52.ru entered our register through the nn.ru directory, during the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The site left no notable trace in public popularity measurements. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, knigi.r52.ru does not appear: no visit figures or ranking position are recorded for it in our data. In the results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004, the address knigi.r52.ru is likewise absent, although other sites from the same zone — riann.r52.ru and dom.r52.ru — are present there[3]. This is expected for a book retailer: the site was needed by the company as a reference about itself and its discounts, not as a sales channel, and it did not take part in competitions for home pages.

How it closed

No updates after the 2009 version are visible in the surviving snapshots. The last snapshot of the knigi.r52.ru home page in the web archive is dated April 21, 2012; no later states have survived. According to our check, the domain name knigi.r52.ru is not occupied today, and no successor to the address is recorded in our data. Of two decades of the book-trading firm's work online, only archived copies of the home page remain — and it is from them that "Parol NN"'s self-description in 2004 and 2009 is reconstructed.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2009 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)