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Meet Abelujo, a free software solution for managing bookstores
Quoting: Meet Abelujo, a free software solution for managing bookstores —
When I was a computer science student in France, I fell in love with a little bookstore called Antigone, a non-profit library, bookstore, and cafe run entirely by volunteers. Antigone had a great selection, with an emphasis on supporting small, independent publishers and authors and their ideas. You could find thousands of quality books there. They motivated me more than ever to help these kinds of places.
It turned out that the people in charge of Antigone were dreaming of some form of software to help them. They had been using a free software program on a GNU/Linux OS for the library, but only had a spreadsheet in LibreCalc for the bookstore. While the system in place had worked, Antigone needed more than a basic spreadsheet to more effectively run its bookstore. With a small group of more experienced software developers and volunteers, we interviewed the leaders of Antigone and wrote a program based on their specifications. A few years later, after a false start and a short break, the volunteers at Antigone were using the very first version of Abelujo. That was a good feeling. Since then, I have expanded the software with more feedback from professional bookstores which benefit from these improvements.