Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It

nytimes.com

5 points·raju··9 comments

Instead of blaming readers--which this article does--it should blame publishers. They can sell me a $5 instant download and we'd both be better off.

Modernize or die.

Didn't work for the music companies.

iTunes didn't work?

iTunes doesn't belong to the music companies. They're 'trading analog dollars for digital pennies' & they don't even have control over distribution.

It took iTunes 5 years to serve 3 billion songs. Towards the end, Napster hit 2.79 billion songs in one month. There's little goodwill with textbooks, so the piracy rates might be a little north of the default 90%. If I were them, I'd avoid ebooks like the plague.

I've recently rediscovered the library. All the latest stuff including CDs, DVDs and video games. Sure, there's a waitlist for some of the more popular items, but you can't beat the price.

I've found great deals on half.com ... Like all three hardcover volumes of Knuth's TACP for $10 each ($150+ on Amazon). Also a great place for insanely cheap paperbacks (~$1 + shipping).

TACP? The Art of C Programming? Tactical Air Control Party?

I am not hackeeish enough I think.

More often abbreviated TAOCP. But you're right; programmer culture recognizes acronyms like this and SICP, even if they fall under Mark Twain's classic definition: "Books that everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read."

http://www.google.com/search?q=taocp+site%3Anews.ycombinator... is one good way to compile a list of references with similar cachet.

Sorry, that should have been TAOCP, The Art Of Computer Programming. And yes, it is one of those books that everybody wishes they had read at some point (although not everybody wants to actually read it).

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