The Post-Soviet Handbook: A Guide to Grassroots Organizations and Internet Resources in the New Independent States continued to sell well in 1997. We sold 582 copies during the year, bringing total sales of the book since its publication in mid-1996 to 1,788. The Handbook helped CCSI record its best-ever year for literature sales, as we grossed more than $13,000 from sales of literature and royalties combined.

Publishing the Handbook has helped CCSI in a number of ways. It enhanced our credibility as a professional organization. In a report done for the World Bank by University of Maryland economist Leonid Polischuk, The Post-Soviet Handbook was described as the best analysis to date of embryonic civil society in Russia and other former communist states.

"CCSI is ... an extremely effective clearinghouse that publishes directories of organizations in the field, newsletters and bulletins, and runs a boffo Web site." --The Seattle Weekly, March 19, 1997 "Anyone with connections to the former Soviet Union will want to have this directory at hand." --Elliot Bay Booknotes Fall 1996 "... the most comprehensive survey of the Russian third sector ..." --Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector, University of Maryland Russian Civil Society Report for the World Bank, 1997

Additionally, as we later learned, the Handbook was an important factor in the decision by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to award CCSI a grant for our new Central Asia initiative. The University of Washington Press has asked CCSI to prepare a second, revised edition of the Handbook for publication in late 1998.

Under our consulting contract with the National Council of Economic Education CCSI also wrote and published, in English and in Russian [Note], an 83-page new book, Internet Resources for Economic Educators. We printed 1,000 copies of the English edition, and about half as many in Russian. Early indications are that both editions will sell out and that a second printing will occur in the second half of 1998.

In 1997 CCSI also published a new edition of its popular Internet Resources for the NIS and, as mentioned previously, together with ASI, The Russian Nonprofit Sector: 1997.

Note:
[]Vozmozhnosti Interneta dlya Prepodavatelei Ekonomicheskikh Distsiplin is available through Wordsmiths Communications in Moscow. E-mail: [email protected], Tel/Fax: +7 (095) 953-3002.