  The Bourgeois construction associates to every contact open book on a
manifold $V$ a contact structure on $V\times T^2$. We study in this article
some of the properties of $V$ that are inherited by $V\times T^2$ and some that
are not.
  Giroux has provided recently a suitable framework to work with contact open
books. In the appendix of this article, we quickly review this formalism, and
we work out a few classical examples of contact open books to illustrate how to
use this new language.
