What's in my hosts' bookstore?

I headed to the Dalian bookstore this afternoon. Near downtown, the store is settled in a 5 floor building and has a foreign languages section. I was looking for the Pen Tsao kang mu (About Chinese medicinal methods, you may buy it online at Amazon.com), hoping to find its English version: Utopia. So I spent time looking for some books aiming to help you out with Chinese writing practices. The shelves are pretty poor and propose books for kids; anyway it suits my needs well enough since my Chinese is way worse than a Chinese kid’s. So I got 6 little workbooks and started strolling around the huge book collection, some are in English, most of them are in Chinese though.

My tiny books to practive Hanzi!

Are the literature habits the same in Europe and China? I actually don’t know much even after visiting Chinese bookstores since I rarely spend time in French stores. The interesting point is that by observing what people read, you can have a clue on their interests, am I wrong? Moreover, the content is managed by the government which does not seem very sincere to me. Maybe I’ll discover books titled “How did the U.S. copy Chinese brands such as Nike and Adidas”. Anyways, some of the proposed books had to be pretty surprising and I kinda found what I was expecting.
First section, no need to read Chinese to catch the lessons of computer books, Java is Java and Windows is Windows for every geek on Earth. Thus I was staring at computer books as TinyDreadMan shouted “You must see this!”. He had bumped into a summary of every model of screen of every existing brand of CRT monitors. What’s so awesome? Well a brief look to the following pages is. This book simply describes how to assemble and create your own CRT monitor by copying original digital circuit designs, all you need to do is choose a brand and a model. It is not so much of a surprise tough, since China has copied everything. We even have a Sydney Opera look-alike construction right outside our campus.
Then I passed by the Encyclopedia sponsored by Google and the Universal Howtos shelves appeared. The first Howto responds to today’s many Chinese’s envy: be white. It might be because of their definition of beauty or to look more European maybe, but Chinese people want to be white. Some young woman use syringes to inject chemical crappy things into their blood in order to be whiter. Caroline Snow’s (the link is what Google gave me :) ) Yoghurt Lady takes 50 pages to explain how to become whiter, soft skinned and so on…
Even better in the Universal Howtos collection is the life for dummies set of books. These explain e-ve-ry-thing. Have some examples:

• Use a screw
• Learn how to sail
• Peal an apple
• Understand a wine bottle opener corkscrew
• Recognize weapons you’ve only seen while playing Counter Strike

Can we find this kind of books in Europe? Did I miss something? Even my buddy Google's results were not satisfying. I know Spud is the kind of websurfer who can find useless websites treating these subjects, I don't know if she's been reading me though. Meet her.