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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

If you want to find more secondhand books, check your local colleges and universities. Some have annual book fairs where books are sold at heavy discounts. I found some gems at such a fair when I went a few years ago. You need to go early though, because others will snatch the best titles if you don't. I also went there a few weeks ago to drop a load of my old textbooks, some of which are like new. Hopefully, they make their way into hands that will find a use for them.

Anecdotally, I currently have an outstanding book order on Amazon for a title I'm convinced I wouldn't find anywhere in store. The title is 20+ years old and a little niche.

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check your local colleges and universities. Some have annual book fairs where books are sold at heavy discounts.

In Chicago, and many other cities, larger library branches have a little room where the books the library doesn't want anymore end up.

In the case of Chicago, the Harold Washington Library has a room with a table and stacks of books. You grab what you want and put a suggested donation into the box on the wall. Usually about 25¢ a book.

In other cities, I've seen this expanded into entire miniature bookstores. But in those cases, they end up charging second-hand retail prices, which is a shame.

I don't really think that's what the article was getting at. (although I'm not quite sure what it was trying to do)

> I'm convinced I wouldn't find anywhere in store

In the “old days“ before Amazon, you would place a custom order at the book store (Not a second-hand book store) and it’d arrive a while later.

In my teens I nearly wore out my local library’s copy of the Terminator 2 Illustrated Screenplay. In the late 90s, on a whim, I went into a B&N that had just been added to the mall where I worked and placed an order, even though I knew it had been long out of print and the likelihood of it ever showing up was near zero.

Around a year later I got a call that my book was in and I could go pick it up. When I arrived, a pristine, new, old-stock copy was waiting for me as if it were still 1991. I still have that book proudly displayed - both the joy of its contents and its discovery will accompany it for the rest of my life.

eBay, Amazon, Shop Goodwill have made this process immensely easier, but I still find joy and thrill in the random second hand store finds.

Now I want that book :)

You still can!

I was interested in a book that went for $120 on Amazon; a local shop ordered for me at $80 instead. It took about a week, so maybe a hair longer than Amazon. Oddly, I found the link directly from the publisher.

Try Abebooks.com, which is also owned by Amazon.

Also biblio.com, which is not.

Curious, what book did you order at Amazon?

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