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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a book store with a great and relatively up to date technical book section. I would spend a lot of time there.

I’m not even talking up to date with the latest ChatGPT hotness, but any serious programming books written in the last 7 years - especially timeless classics that matter regardless of the technology. Rather that the same Sam’s Learn C++ book that’s been gathering dust for 20 years.

I suspect there actually is a market there, but the problem is you need a very particular book store manager that can curate this well. I guess it would have to be a labor of love, as financially the people who would do this well are busy making much more money as developers.

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In San Jose, there used to be a bookstore named Computer Literacy. If it had to do with computers, technology, start-ups, and other related topics, this place had the books. It was truly a wonderland for book-loving geeks and nerds. I was in there a couple of times per month. Unfortunately, they charged list prices on everything, and they finally got eaten by Amazon, but while they were around, it was glorious.

CL opened a satellite store in Tyson's Corner VA outside DC which lasted a couple years. Between CL and Reiter's (which still exists in DC), I must have spent several thousands on full price trade, textbook, and reference books. This made sense because I could look closely at each book before buying to see if it merited the investment. I've found that buying online works only if the book is discounted significantly. Too often now I find the online blurb and user opinions lead me to buy a book that I wouldn't have if I'd held it in my hands before parting with $50 or more.

There was also a Computer Literacy in Sunnyvale, with a Togo’s right by it, and a Fry’s across the street and WeirdStuff Warehouse near that. That little cluster made a great destination for a lunch and geek stuff run.

I went there once or twice but it was a fraction of the size of the San Jose store on 1st Street. At least the Togo's was nearby ;)

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.

I 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.

This 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.

University 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.

By "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.

No. 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.

Given 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.

> 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.

Pour one out for Powell's technical bookstore in Portland. I was sad when it closed in 2010.

Thats where I got my copy of Code published by Microsoft

A new edition came out recently, in case you haven't seen it.

Oh man, this is what I first thought of when the question was raised. I was lucky to get there in 2008, I guess.

Sad is an understatement. I found such obscure titles there that even my university library didn't have a copy. It was like going to a major research library where you could buy the books. I never went there without a few hundred in my wallet just in case.

More like 2014, I must have been there right before it closed

I'm working on opening a book store: online only, print books only (no eBooks), highly opinionated and curated inventory, mostly books published before 1980 (with exceptions), no current bestsellers, doubling down on store design (mostly text with cover images hidden by default), speed and ease of use, how recommendations (not reviews) are displayed, etc.

The catalog is still coming together, but "serious programming books" is a key offering.

That sounds pretty cool. Not sure it sounds very profitable, but I hope it is because it sounds well suited to my tastes. Have you considered curating for physical book quality? The emergence of the e-book has caused me to pay more attention to the book as an actual object. If I'm going to have an actual book in my house, it should be durable and pleasant to handle. A nicely bound book with good print quality affords a pleasure beyond just the content.

Yeah, but I'm going to start small, see where it goes. And yes, very much focused on the quality of the book—typesetting, binding, overall feel. Oftentimes I'll order a paperback from Barnes & Noble and (to me) it's not readable due to poor printing or just an insanely small font size. Over the years I've collected a lot of unique letterpress editions of short stories, poems, works of nonfiction, etc. and would like to add some of these prints to the catalog, as long as they're still available from the press.

Where at?

> online only

oh dang.

Seattle has one https://www.adasbooks.com/content/store

Ada’s is small but magical. It’s nowhere near Powell’s technical books at its prime, but walking into the backroom at Ada’s really brings me back to browsing technical books 20 years ago.

I’ve never failed to go back there and find something fascinating I have never heard of before. Though most of the people studying/working in that room will always wonder what kind of person sincerely gets excited about this stuff.

B&N is pretty up to date in the computer section actually. For example, I normally see No Starch Press "The Rust Programming Language (2nd edition)" and "Rust for Rustaceans" and lots of their python books and some that I was also interested in like "The Art of 64-bit Assembly" and "Understanding the Machine." They also have a lot of security books proportion-wise. But the section is smaller than I like and leans toward the mainstream of course.

What I find however, is nothing like it used to be, at least in certain locations. I'm sure it varies by location but I miss the one closest to Redmond (Microsoft) which (at least when I went there around 2000) had multiple full rows of computer books including highly technical ones that you don't see anymore in person.

Uh, where are you seeing "Rust for Rustaceans" and "The Art of 64-Bit Assembly" at a Barnes & Noble? I just wandered into a B&N store in Cupertino after shopping at a Guitar Center, and their technology section was basically a shelf of Excel guides and XYZ for Dummies.

I'm actually surprired there's a narrative of "B&N is coming back." Their stores, what few times I've had the misfortune of wandering inside in recent years, are still excruciatingly beige, useless, and (in the words of the TLA) "crucifyingly boring."

This is the flip side of the current CEO's focus on letting local stores make their own decisions. When the decisions align with your interests (like my store's excellent manga focus), it's great! When they don't, like your example of the Cupertino store, it's pretty terrible.

Where is your store located?

Stonebriar Mall in Frisco, Texas.

Both major B&N stores in Austin have had both of those titles within the last month. They all tend to be relatively overstocked on No Starch Press stuff (not to say they don't produce good books), but understocked on basically anything else.

The best I've encountered is Foyles in London, though even that had cut back substantially prior to the pandemic when I was last there.

Yeah Foyles was excellent. Spent many an hour there, can’t say I have been in the last 15 years though.

Foyles is also part of James Daunt's Waterstones these days, having been sold in 2018.

Removing these books was what Daunt did at Waterstones.

“Daunt also removed legal textbooks, technical guides, reference books from the shelves. In return, he stocked more books that customers were delighted to discover which led to an increase in sales.” [0]

If there is “a market there”, it’s probably as a specialised store.

[0] https://startupmarketer.co/how-a-physical-bookseller-turned-...

You'll find a lot of that in sufficiently large college towns. Berkeley, for example, is fantastic for bookstores: bleeding-edge technical sections (trying to compete with the campus bookstore for required reading), several overtly leftist bookstores for when you're really looking for a niche translation of some niche 19th century philosopher's magnum opus, and all that.

In the early oughts in the Boston area, I loved going to SoftPro Books. It was also a way to socialize with techie friends. Unfortunately, the chain shut down in a few years.

I believe it was owned by an ex-Lotus employee named Rick Treitman. If someone knows him, he might have some insights into the business.

There was a whole chain of them: Computer Literacy. Killed by the Web, I guess.

Mine literally has a book on programming iOS 5. I think I read parts of that copy when iOS 5 came out 11 years ago.

Borders was always so much better for technical books :(

A micro library at a maker space might be a better option.

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