Built on ten years’ experience, DiBiDo is an online distribution platform for eBooks that were published in Central and Eastern Europe, or focus on this region. DiBiDo is a rational development of the Central and Eastern European Online Library - C.E.E.O.L., an online library for periodicals, which was set up in 2000, by the firma Questa.Soft GmbH, as a result of a decade of work by the Frankfurt Eastern/Western European Cultural Center Palais Jalta. The foundation for these projects was laid in the 1990's, at the annual book fairs in Frankfurt, which offered the most appropriate opportunities for networking among publishers, as well as for discussions and all kinds of public events.

The eBooks in DiBiDo (and the periodicals in C.E.E.O.L.) are provided by numerous publishers and editors, mainly from Central European countries, along with those from the West who deal with Eastern Europe, its histories, languages and literatures, along with its cultural, social and political realities. Following numerous requests from our partner publishers, Questa.Soft decided to provide the Eastern European publishers an online instrument in order to be able to distribute their books online, in digital format, to readers from across the world.

DiBiDo’s and C.E.E.O.L.’s primary concern is to make documents available to a public which can currently only gain limited access when using traditional channels or who have been previously unaware of the existence of these documents, and also to provide a closer alliance between the people of Europe, based on shared values, taking into full account national and regional identities, cultures and values and languages.

DiBiDo’s aim is to contribute to the strengthening of the communication among the actors in the East (authors, publishers) and their readers and counterparts in the West by providing another stable platform on which this communication can flourish.

In the first phase, DiBiDo will offer full text electronic copies of books in PDF format, and also carefully chosen and redigitised older out-of-prints of historical monographs and similar publications which are still important for the research of the Central and Eastern European affairs.