4 ms·
B&N used to have this. It was also one of the most shoplifted sections people would steal from. The books were expensive and certain ones could always be easily
by ineedasername 4y ago
B&N used to have this. It was also one of the most shoplifted sections people would steal from. The books were expensive and certain ones could always be easily flipped online.
- grugagag 4y agoI had no idea technical books were the target to shoplifters. I imagine it wasn’t techies stealing these but other opportunists. I never minded buying IT books even when I wasn’t in the best financial situation. 40-50 bucks for a good book could bring almost limitless rewards. One thing though, I needed to browse and skim through the book to decide whether it was a purchase or not. Most books I bought like that were thoroughly studied. I can’t say the same thing about books I bought online though.
- Jtsummers 4y agoThis has been highly dependent on the particular B&N, in my experience. One in Raleigh (may have technically been Cary, NC, this was 15 years or so ago) had Knuth's TAOCP on the shelves, never seen that anywhere else. Certainly not in towns with less technical inclination (a town I lived in in GA for a decade, for instance, had a miserable technical section) where the technical book section was dominated by Windows and MS Office how-tos.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoUniversity bookstores have (or had?) plenty of this. Like UW's bookstore or the engineering bookstore for Stanford. Haven't been to one of those for a long time, however.
- legerdemain 4y agoBy "the engineering bookstore for Stanford," do you mean their visitor bookstore, the one that has a cafe and sells branded campus gear like hoodies, mugs, and pennants? Yeah, it has a TAoCP box set on the shelf, but their tech shelf is otherwise pretty small, and far smaller than their entrepreneurship and business shelves, or even the "psychology and self-help" shelf.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoNo. The one that used to be next to DEC SRC near the Caltrain station…but that was 1999 or so. It was just a bookstore for the engineering school, so no hoodies or stuff, or books unrelated to engineering.
- legerdemain 4y agoGiven that the only parts of the Stanford campus that are near Caltrain today are some patient facilities and the arboretum, I suspect that this is something that has not existed in decades.
- bsder 4y ago> The books were expensive and certain ones could always be easily flipped online. This finished the destruction of the technical books sections of Half Price Books. The first half of the destruction was online shopping. No longer could you find an entire technical library hitting the store because someone just died and their family dumped everything to Half Price. The most valuable books got skimmed off immediately and never made it to the shelves anymore. However, for a while the "standard" kind of technical books still hit the shelves so you could snag them at decent prices. However, shoplifting became sufficiently rampant that Half Price seems to have even removed those. Now, you can only get those books online, and the only books remaining on the shelves have the quality that results from them having effectively have no resale value at all.