After being under construction for almost two months, our online bookshop has now reopened, bigger and better. For starters we are featuring over 750 titles -- all books written and published by Malaysians or written about Malaysia (or Malaya and Borneo, in the case of older titles) -- currently on our shelves, but we expect the numbers to rapidly rise by year end. In other words, it is meant to be a one-stop site meant for anyone -- researchers, scholars or interested readers -- looking for material about this country. (The main reason for the delay was that I had to learn and understand the fundamentals of PHP coding and migrate the entire site to an Apache (Unix) server which I thought would be easy, but was not. Then I discovered that Unix server names were case sensitive. Arggggh! I mention all that just to impress you.)
It is not infrequently that we receive requests from Embassies and Universities for our list of Malaysian books. In the past we have kept them satisfied with spreadsheets. But this is becoming increasingly difficult to generate, seeing how the number of Malaysian titles in print has grown exponentially these last few years.
Most would have heard the story of Ron Klein's first visit to Silverfish Books (I think this was in the year 2000) at our old premises in Desa Seri Hartamas, asking to see our Malaysian 'collection'. That was one embarrassing moment: here we were calling ourselves a Malaysian bookshop with a two foot shelf of local books, with a little over two dozen titles (most of them from Skoobs and Rhino Press, and the rest from Pa' Chong). That was one of the reasons we decided to go into publishing.
But that was then. Currently, we have almost an entire wall lined with Malaysian books, which make up almost 50% of our sales. (Maybe, the entire shop in future!) We have now put it all online for easy browsing, and buying. (For the purposes of this site, we are interpreting Malaysian books as those written by Malaysian authors, books published -- and/or printed -- within the country, those by others writing about their experiences here and books on history.)
In the (online) bookstore, you can browse books by the author, subject or publisher. I have also a sphider installed (similar to what Google uses) for quick indexing and searches. Although the default currency we use is MYR, browsers can check prices in USD, GBP, AUD or the Euro. We accept Credit cards (Visa and Mastercard), Alliance online transfer, CIMB Clicks, FXP, Hong Leong transfer, Maybank2u, Meps cash, Mobile money, Paypal (only in USD), RHB online and Webcash.
You can also put yourself on our 'Back in stock notification' system if you come across a book that is out of stock but you'd like a copy. We hope you understand that many of our books are the last surviving anywhere in the world, so we might not be able to put every book back in stock. But we shall notify you of these.
Well, do give the site a whirl. Although we have checked the site quite extensively (but that is always relative), I are sure some of you might encounter glitches. Please send us your feedback and we will try and rectify those. Of course, there are certain features we cannot modify without a major reprogramming.
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