From its conception, Electre has supplied book professionals (editors, booksellers, librarians) with exhaustive and quality information about books in print in the French language.

Electre is a commercial branch of the Cercle de la Librairie (a professional association founded in 1847) and produces the bibliographic database for francophone countries.

About 20 people work for Electre, including bibliographic editors, proof-readers and IT specialists and they carry out the job of gathering information from the editors (about 8,000 firms) and scrupulously cataloguing every title.

Since 1984 an abstract has been added to every bibliographic record as well as a double semantic index (according to class and key word).

Since 1985 Electre has indicated the reading level for every entry (for everyone, for professionals, for university use etc) as well as the product category that the book belongs to (pocket-sized, for the young, manuals, art books etc)

Since 1999 the database has been further improved with the addition of cover illustrations and indexes of the catalogued books.