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We’ve opened a new poll on the blog. I buy a lot of computer books, or at least try to get my hands on them any way I can. I’m curious about where you get your computer or technical books. Or maybe you don’t, which is reasonable given the state of today’s economy. But if you do buy an occasional computer-related book, where do you go? The poll will let you pick up to 3 booksellers. If you have a favorite not on the list, please post a comment about it. Feel free to leave a comment as well about why you favor certain sites or sellers over others. Or leave a comment about the last computer-related book you bought.
12 comments on “New Poll: Where do you buy books?”
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My “other” would be Sapien’s scriptingoutpost.com
amazon.ca and chapters.ca
Ebay.com
As a writer, I should not admit this, but if I can’t get it in an electronic format I will still hesitate before purchasing a bound book. I just like to beable to search, index, carry with me, and find online my reference materials.
I’m curious to see how far ebooks will go, especially as more and more people move to smartphone like devices with increased capacity.
QuantumBooks.com
I still buy a LOT of real books (primarily technical books).
E-books only go so far with me, especially with limited screen real estate.
Since I have a pretty good recall on what I read, it is only slightly faster for me to search for an ebook and search the pdf for the content I want vs. grabbing the book and turning to the section I need. In addition to the screen space savings, it just FEELS RIGHT to have a physical book (but I’ve been a book addict for years).
Portable Ebook readers are interesting, but until they can show screenshots and code samples better, they are not a good option for me.
Steven,
You got it in one. The ebook format, ala Kindle and Sony Reader are great for fiction, or even most non-fiction. But the format can’t handle special formatting for code samples. Graphics don’t seem to fly either. That’s why it’s hard to do an ebook in anything other than a PDF format. At least right now.
The ability to search through ebooks is especially helpful with technical material, where I’m frequently scanning backwards, looking for a particular tidbit. The physical books that I own are relied upon so heavily and maintain their authoritativeness over time, so that I must have them at hand, literally. To illustrate this, my dog-earred copies of Friedl’s “Mastering Regular Expressions” and Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen’s “Programming Perl” have been joined by Bruce Payette’s “Windows PowerShell in Action” and Lee Holmes “PowerShell Cookbook”.
Being from Canada, like Marco, I usually get books from amazon.ca and chapters.ca since getting books online seem to average about 30% cheaper than going to a physical store. But there have been instances when amazon.com had a book and it wasn’t carried on the Canadian sites when I did a search. Then I’d use the US website.
My “other” would be Sapien’s scriptingoutpost.com also
Borders has a coupon almost every week good for 20 to 30% off on one item. I will go there, if they have the book I want in stock and the coupon price is close to Amazon’s. Otherwise I will endure the shipping wait. For new books, The University book stores and specialty stores don’t carry what I want. I’ll buy Manning’s pre-release PDF with the hard copy direct from the publisher and keep a final copy and print off sections to mark-up for study as well as keep the book. I like being able to print out study sheets at 150% normal size. I don’t like studying from a small screen–you can’t find a good 600 dpi tablet PC.