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22nd November 2013, 05:00 PM | #1 |
Penultimate Amazing
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What happened to the computer section of bookstores?
Or is it just where I'm at? Wasn't that long ago (and had been, for many years) that you'd walk into Waldens or whatever and they'd have whole long rows of stuff. Now I walked in and it took no small effort to find it...tucked in the back corner of the store. And the "section" was literally about a 6'x6' chunk of one row, and that was almost entirely programming books. Doesn't anyone but developer geeks browse computer books any more?
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22nd November 2013, 06:19 PM | #2 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Google killed all that reading stuff.
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22nd November 2013, 08:55 PM | #3 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Amazon.
Specialized reference books are probably a perfect example of something you'd want to order exactly the one you need. I suspect that most brick-and-mortar stores discovered that such books were the first kind of inventory to stop moving from their shelves, once Amazon took off. I doubt it's actually "developer geeks" that are buying these programming books. |
22nd November 2013, 08:58 PM | #4 |
Penguilicious Spodmaster.
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I'd guess that by the time a computer book is printed, it's probably out of date. They'd only gather dust in a bookshop.
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22nd November 2013, 09:39 PM | #5 |
Penultimate Amazing
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I'd say you were lucky to find them at all. My (chain) bookstore has a nasty habit of randomly rearranging all the sections every couple of years. Oh, they left all the magazine racks in the same place, but switched all the categories around. Look at how much effort it takes just to irritate me.
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22nd November 2013, 10:05 PM | #6 |
Penultimate Amazing
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National chain bookstores tend to be awful for anything but buying the latest, most popular hardcovers (on which there tend to be decent discounts) and perhaps perusing the magazine selection. For everything else the Internet does it all better and cheaper.
In my town we've got one of the biggest bookstores in America (Powell's Books) and I never went there looking for something specific without finding it (usually used of course). Still, even they "consolidated" their technical bookstore into a smaller area when they closed the separate location and moved it next to their "City of Books" location, reportedly because sales of that category had gone way down. Now of course, if something's not available as an e-book, I'm probably not gonna read it. |
22nd November 2013, 10:11 PM | #7 |
Penultimate Amazing
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23rd November 2013, 06:29 AM | #8 |
Mafia Penguin
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Not quite. Some technology moves fast, but even then a well-organized book is better at teaching you the basics and the structure behind the technology than (nearly) all the write-ups you find on the web. For example, for learning the language C I'd still recommend starting with Kernighan & Ritchie's classic.
So yes, I'd say that the local bookstores fell victim to Amazon insofar as the buyers really wanted to learn what they're dealing with, and to everything you find on the web for those who only want a quick fix for their computer questions. |
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23rd November 2013, 06:52 AM | #9 |
Master Poster
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whats a "book store"?
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23rd November 2013, 10:30 AM | #10 |
Penultimate Amazing
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23rd November 2013, 11:57 AM | #11 |
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What sort of computer book are you thinking of? Assume you know you can often preview a book on Amazon.
I read other books, but haven't touched my programming reference books in years-- it's too much trouble to look up a word in the index, hold that page while finding the reference's first page number, scan the page for the usage, re-looking it up in the index because your finger slipped... ugh! |
23rd November 2013, 06:15 PM | #12 |
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24th November 2013, 03:28 AM | #13 |
Gentleman of leisure
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This.
Many years ago I went into a big book shop and tried to find a book on COBOL. I think I only found two or three in my life. Now I would have no hope of finding anything like a COBOL book in a shop. Soon I would be lucky to find any sort of reference book in a shop. I go to Amazon and see three pages worth of COBOL books. Yes, the demand for COBOL books would be rather small, but that is the point. There would be many such subjects that are hard to find a decent book on, but go to Amazon and your choices are far bigger than even the biggest bookshop could ever hope to stock in any time period. |
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24th November 2013, 08:35 AM | #14 |
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24th November 2013, 08:40 AM | #15 |
Penultimate Amazing
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No one book in mind, this was a general observation. Basically not a programmer book, which means they didn't have it. Re previews, yes but typically it's just the first few pages (including the TOC ) which usually doesn't really give me enough of a feel for the book, esp if there's a particular aspect of it I'm interested in.
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25th November 2013, 11:40 AM | #16 |
Nap, interrupted.
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26th November 2013, 06:14 AM | #17 |
No longer the 1
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28th November 2013, 07:16 AM | #18 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Since I've been policing the university here for over 30 years, I've watched personal computing evolve.
Used to be you'd walk through the various engineering schools and see lists of classes and flyers for courses on the latest computer programming language of the day. Then, within months in some cases, you'd see stacks of thick texts for same piled up on the "free to take" tables in those same hallways. I saw tiny little first-off computers sitting in labs with sheets of multi-strand connector cable leading to huge breadboards full of chips and things.... Didn't realize at the time these guys were likely working on what was to become the "PC" in just a few years. |
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