Slashdot Mirror

There is also http://www.abebooks.com/ which is a place for many, many different independant bookstores that have new/used books.

From the Amazon listing for the hardcover of The Deltoid Pumpkin Seen by McPhee:

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 9, 1963)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374137811

The same date is shown on the listing on ABE Books. I believe that McPhee may have issued an updated version in 1973. I seem to recall that there was material about the what the inventors felt was the promise of fuel efficient transport in the time of the "oil crisis". My point was that this idea has been around for thirty years.

Taflak Lysandra and Brightsuit McBear are a couple of his works that are written expressly for the young reader. You will likely have to get them from AbeBooks. I can also recommend his Lando Calrisian trilogy, it's quite readable and in a known "universe".

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=6&x=48

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=0&tn=brightsuit&x=0

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=0&tn=taflak&x=0

Bob-

Taflak Lysandra and Brightsuit McBear are a couple of his works that are written expressly for the young reader. You will likely have to get them from AbeBooks. I can also recommend his Lando Calrisian trilogy, it's quite readable and in a known "universe".

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=6&x=48

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=0&tn=brightsuit&x=0

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=0&tn=taflak&x=0

Bob-

Taflak Lysandra and Brightsuit McBear are a couple of his works that are written expressly for the young reader. You will likely have to get them from AbeBooks. I can also recommend his Lando Calrisian trilogy, it's quite readable and in a known "universe".

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=6&x=48

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=0&tn=brightsuit&x=0

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults? an=l+neil+smith&y=0&tn=taflak&x=0

Bob-

Some time ago, I was looking for a textbook for a class (my campus bookstore was out-of-stock) and found what seemed like a good deal from one of the vendors on abebooks.com. When the book arrived, it was a paperback and the title on the front was in Chinese characters, but the inside was the camera-equivalent text that I would have gotten if I had bought it locally. I'd say that in my department about 20-25% of the Computer Science textbooks other students carry are similar copies, published in China, ostensibly for local use, and sold online to starving students here. Posting anonymous because I'm skeptical of the legality of this arrangement.

The ABE (http://www.abebooks.com/) is a searchable inventory of a gazillion independent bookstores world wide.

If Google Print tells you the book exists, you can go to ABE and find it in some bookshop in New Zealand, and order it with your credit card. I've used ABE to buy books that are out of print on several occasions.

Now, if Google integrated their Print search with ABE, then the "buy it now" could be buying it from that rare bookseller in the middle of nowhere.

This kicks all kinds of ass.

In this case, AMD would have been the "don't be evil" warm and fuzzy choice (see AMD-v-Intel suit). Transmeta would have been the cool-tech choice. Picking Intel was pure cold business rationality.

Jobs doesn't bend other people's reality so much as exercises his power to mould new realities. This is evident in his string of lucrative industry firsts.

(Malone's Infinite Loop is a fairly balanced account of Jobs, rich in background detail, neither hagiography nor a total hatchet-job.)

In his wonderful book Peace on Earth, Lem has banished all warfare to the Moon, where robot armies, in a self-evolving arms race, battle each other on behalf of their nations on Earth. Highly recommended, this book is a great joy and very memorable not just for the plot and action, but the philosophical meditations we expect from Lem.

1) First, Microsoft goes their own way.

2) Commodity standards and protocols end up being much better.

3) Microsoft makes a big to-do about how they are "embracing standards" by dumping their proprietary thing for the commodity standard thing.

4) Microsoft quietly introduces non-standard extentions into their implementation of what used to be a standard, then declares that everyone else is being incompatible.

With the patents (regardless of prior art, it seems. morons in government, but I repeat myself) Microsoft will be able to both declare how the competition is incompatible and prevent actual compatibility from being reverse-engineered. Unlike copyright, reverse engineering a patented thing is prosecutable.

Microsoft is not changing their tune. Everything they do is to boost image and/or profitability. Period. They have no other motivation.

As a publicly traded company, in fact they should have no other motivation than maximizing shareholder value. If the principles and officers do anything else they themselves are legally liable to those shareholders. For a good dissertation on this idea, read Neil Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_.

That is one of the concrete reasons that FOSS beats commercial software again and again. The goal of FOSS is to write good software.

Bob-

I've got some books that I've been looking for for years and won't find anywhere for any amount of money.

Look on ABE Books and see if you can find it listed there. It's a website listing, as they say "13,000 booksellers selling 70 million books" and is a decent place to get older and otherwise unavailable books.

I picked up a copy of the 1926 printing of The Historical Atlas by William Shepherd through them for $8, just because it has some absolutely cool maps of Europe from the first millenium A.D. Most of the maps are available at the UTexas Library website but I wanted a copy to hold in my hands. The 1926 printing is significant, it is the latest edition that is out of copyright.

George W. Harper's fine article "Build Your Own A-Bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood for US$ 20,00.

Agree with heroic Hertzfeld (more info in Programmers at Work ). I'd add Warnock and also strongly endorse Wolfram (whose invincible iconoclasm is admirable). And PARC should be better represented, I'd cite Adele Goldberg for the under-appreciated Smalltalk-80. At least she gets to contribute to Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds.

Where are Dijkstra and Wirth (who did far more than most people realise - Wirth essentially created a European "Sun Microsystems" at ETH)? Remove the "+10:American" bias - but Knuth should probably be mentioned at least twice. :)

Funny though, usually Hollywood uses the fact that in adapting a *novel* they have to figure out what to omit.

Sometimes they do get it right. The English Patient was made into a good movie (if you like weepy romances, which in this case I happened to). It was derived from a mediocre book of the same name, but in fact focused on a single eposode. The main characters of the book became peripheral characters in the film, and vice versa.

I hate to praise a generally creepy industry like Hollywood, especially since they usually do such a poor job of book adaptation, but c'mon, they do sometimes really improve on the material.

And also, the novel, which can include lots of inner dialogue, description, and tangental matter, really depends on different expressive vehicles from a film. Most "faithfully filmed books" are truly dreadful films!

Yes, for science/eng majors, textbook buying is a huge pain, but for people like me (English grad) textbooks are cheap, the editions are plentiful, and they're not twenty-pound monsters that crush my frail laptop when I'm going from class to class.

I've said it a thousand times: no matter what your major is, GET THE BOOK LIST FROM THE PROF two or three months before the class starts and ORDER ONLINE. Amazon.com ships textbooks free over what, $25? Even if you save a couple of bucks on one book, you're winning and leaving the overpriced univ book store with leftover stock. This is a good thing.

For a good fictional book on an Anarchist society check out The Dispossessed.

Thoolie asks...

"Just wondering, 20 years ago all you could get was ATT, now they are selling off their arms and legs left and right. Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend? (I think we all know about the anti monoploy suit and the baby bells, but there must be more?)"

There's a couple of pretty good books available that will give you some excellent ideas as to What Went Wrong with the Bell System, and much of it can be blamed on the U.S. legal system.

For starters, I recommend 'The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Alfred Duerig and Constantine Kraus. It will give you divestiture and breakup from an engineer's perspective. You can find an excerpt from the book here.

Another good one is 'A Voice in the Wilderness' by Alfred Duerig. That one's more of a dedication and autobiography for Constantine Kraus, but it will also give you some more insights into divestiture and What Really Happened.

Both books are out of print, BTW, but you should be able to find them either through Abebooks online, or from Ebay. I got my pair through finding used booksellers with copies on Abebooks.

While I'm thinking about it, the Bell System Memorial site is a wonderful resource for both historical and technical info on the once-great Ma Bell.

From my perspective: The divestiture and breakup of the Bell System was utterly unnecessary, along the lines of using an antiaircraft gun to kill mosquitoes. There had to have been other (and better) ways to go about allowing consumers to connect their own goodies to the lines, encourage development of alternative services, etc.

Happy hunting.

You're right; you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. For example, by looking at the cover, one might have missed the fact that first lady Lynn Cheney's book "Sisters" is a lesbian-themed smut novel which goes for about 10,000$ these days.

Maybe we're being too cautious, or unfairly lumping Germany and France together. (A search for one of the books on abebooks.com reveals lots of German booksellers offering it. I will have to bring that up to my boss.) Yahoo was prevented from selling this stuff in France, though, and I believe we would be, too, though AFAIK we are self-censoring it.

Only published in paper and long out of print--but available from second-hand booksellers such as abebooks--you may want to read Barbara O'Brien's haunting book "Operators and Things." This 1958 book was written by a spontaneously-recovered schizophrenic and is a first-person view of the schizophrenic experience.

The title refers to her delusional revelation that what seems to be human beings in the world are actually two different kinds of beings, Operators and Things, and that she is a Thing.

Test 002 is meaningless: the times are too short to have any statistical significance whatsoever.

Some of the comments are foolish; for example, Test 009: "Surprisingly, ReiserFS wins". Why is that surprising? Perhaps it follows from the design of ReiserFS. It's as if the benchmarker does not realise that different algorithms and design goals are involved in each filesystem.

Finally, I agree completely about the graphs, they're illegible. It's indeed amazing nobody has pointed this out. The guy desperately needs to buy and read a set of Tufte's works.

For this to be a useful benchmark, at least twice as much intelligence and effort would need to be applied...

I order a fair number of things from eBay, and also AbeBooks.com (nice for buying used textbooks) so I don't really feel that I'm out of touch with international shipping rates. However, using BorderFree at Half.com results in absolutely outrageous shipping fees. If I spend $15US, once BorderFree's fees are added in I tend to end up with a bill of maybe $45US, versus somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 - $10 for shipping a similar item from other online retailers.

Don't forget the classic One Two Three . . . Infinity : Facts and Speculations of Science by George Gamow (AbeBooks might have it for cheaper.).

A textbook of mine was about $115 CAD this semester; I ordered a used copy from Powells for $12 USD; I included a few other books and got free shipping. It cost me $72 CAD for four books instead of $115 (plus tax) for one new one. To sum: Powells is wonderful, esp. for Canadians, as they charge GST at the source which doesn't hold up customs.

ABEBooks is another great place to shop - they're a collection of used booksellers across NA and Europe and as such usually have everything you could ever want. You really need to watch some booksellers on shipping - one seller in Cali wanted $15 USD for shipping on a book that should only cost $3-5 USD (media book rate int'l), for example, but if you're careful you can still save a bundle.

Finally, sometimes Amazon or Barnes & Noble or other large retailers have better prices than the uni's bookstore, important for when you absolutely need that 17th edition.

To put all this into perspective: if I had bought all my books new this semester at the local store, it would have cost about $350 CAD + 13% tax; as it was, using the above methods I spent about $125 CAD total.

One final note: to do this properly you need to talk to your future profs about a month and a half before the class starts (i.e. as soon as you're registered) to get a book list, as some booksellers can take longer than others, esp. if you need to order internationally. Keep in mind that big sellers (even powells) usually ships within 24 hours. Good luck! Hope this saves you all some cash!

I rather suspected it might be 2002, but abe has it as 2003, and so does amazon. It's generally listed as February 2003. It's also included in a lot of top ten 2003 lists. I don't have a problem with the possibility of being wrong here or anything, but I couldn't find a definitive date anywhere.

• Pentium 4 2.8C ($213)
• Intel D875PBZ motherboard ($142)
• Two Kingston 512MB DDR400 DIMMs ($168 for both)
• Antec SLK3700-BQE quiet case ($77)

I'm looking forward to a full Intel^3 (cpu/chipset/board) solution for ultimate stability.

Books:

• Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace ($12 new)
• The Principia by Isaac Newton ($15 new)
• Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith ($12 new)
• Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C (2nd Ed.) by James D. Foley ($30 used)
• Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (2nd Ed.) by Andrew S. Tanenbaum ($20 used)
• Design and Evolution of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup ($28 used)
• The Book of Numbers by John Horton Conway ($22 used)

Also try abebooks.com. I did a search and found a number of copies, available both in the US and the UK. Some paperbacks, some hardcover and some as cheap as $10.

These might seem ridiculously old, specialized, or classical, but I remember liking them a lot and really getting a lot out of them.

Math-
Geometry: Euclid - The Elements. You probably don't need to learn geometry again, but your kids might, and the proofs are very well done and worth reading if you've never seen them. You don't have to read all of the books (there are 12 (or 13? I don't remember)). You could probably find a suggested course of study on the web site of the University of Chicago, Harvard, or St. John's College.

Probability: William Feller - An Introduction to Probability Theory and it's Applications (2 volumes). It's a bit expensive since it's nearly out of print, but very well done. You could probably find it used on abebooks. There aren't enough problems per chapter, but if you search the web you can find plenty of problems (Harvard teaches a class on this text and they have problems on line).

Number Theory: I remember that in college we read an essay on "Continuity and Irrational Numbers" by Richard Dedekind (found in Essays on the Theory of Numbers) that was very good. I have never taken a class on number theory or anything like that, but I found the essay very interesting and not too much work (a few days of reading, maybe a week tops).

I can recommend that you DON'T waste your time with Calculus by James Stewart. It won't kill you, but there must be better text books out there.

Science:
Physiscs:
Relativity The Special and General Theory - Einstein. Not too hard, actually, and you could almost certainly find a class, lecture, or study group that's working on it if you didn't want to tackle it by yourself. There are also all sorts of books that help explain it (Amazon lists tons) if you just want a study guide.

Eight Lectures on Theoretical Physics - Max Plank. Lectures 1, 3, 5 & 6 work together to explain quantum theory and Plank's constant. They aren't all that hard, mathematically. There are a few equations per lecture, but not too many, and their generally pretty well explained in the text. You might need a friend who knows math to explain a few of them.

Genetics is probably not a field that you're interested in, but The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley are both very good. If you're not sure if you are interested, read The Selfish Gene first. Then, if you find you like that kind of stuff, you can move on to The Red Queen.

For those that are interested, there was a book published about the entire incident. Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid. It's out of print, but you can locate used copies through Amazon or Abebooks.

From this source I located the jacket text. Enjoy.

John Aristotle Phillips is the Princeton student who became world-famous when he designed an atomic bomb both to demonstrate the dangers of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and to fulfil his academic requirements.

Prior to this, John had average grades, played the cowbell in the Princeton Marching Band (before he was fired), auditioned to become the Princeton Tiger Mascot (and got the job?because no one else showed up for the tryouts), rode his unicycle around campus, and started a pizza delivery service.

But once he designed the bomb, it wasn't long before newspapers interviewed him, television filmed him, girls chased him, foreign governments approached him, spies contacted him, the United States Senate congratulated him, Hollywood beckoned with its bent finger, and a Madison Avenue book publisher fought off the competition for the right to publish his story.

This is the story, then, of what happens when an Obscure Individual becomes a Personality. It is the story of instant fame, of idealism, of success at a very young age, of college life today, and of a friendship that has resulted in the writing of this funny, fetching, edifying memoir of a glorious time spent in a marvelous cause.

Here is one kid who set out to make a point and change the world. Here is one kid, triumphant.

currency converter - findsounds.com

how stuff works - infoplease

about.com - librarian's index

rebecca's reference - tom mayo's links
-words:

acronym/abbr -lookup -finder -bm

trans -babelfish -worldlingo -google bm

bartleby

phrontistery

pseudodictionary

jargon file
--music

epitonic - pitchfork

sonomu - electraum

gnod - audioquarium --books:

amazon - abebooks - bookfinder

gutenberg & onlinebooks

loc.gov - lambiek comiclopedia - rebecca's books

One good place I've found to get out-of-print books is at abebooks.com. They're UI isn't that great, but the selection is incredible; basically used book stores around the world load up their entire inventories.

Half-Price Books is not nationwide, but does have locations in eleven states (WHQ is in Dallas). As a fellow Columbusite, I second FMC's complimentary post. As with most used book stores, though, you have to purchase what you can get when you find it, 'cause the next time you visit, it might be gone!

... let me know. Then I might take a look at the wheel you've reinvented.

You can find it on the Advanced Book Exchange for about $7.00.

I have read quite a number of layman's Physics books, and I think that John Gribbin's are amongst the most accessible. He writes clearly and consicely, but also has some color to his style. He is also quite the polymath, and has written books on a broad range of Physics sub-categories and some other topics too.

If you're interested in cosmology at all, then I would highly recommend Hyperspace by Michio Kaku. The middle of the book is a quite meaty, but as a whole the book is a good read.

And since you mentioned cheapskates, there's abebooks.com, which is a site just for those of us that don't particularly want new books, and would rather support some independet retailers.

BTW, one good place for used books is abebooks.

Advanced Book Exchange is what the article speaks of. They're "browse" section isn't perfect, but it does a fairly spiffy job.

I haven't seen anyone bring it up yet, so I thought that I would mention abebooks. The site is basically a portal for used book stores, and you can usually find multiple copies of just about anything that you're looking for.
-

Let me first state that between books and magazines I probably spend about $300-$400 a month. When I travel the stores I check out are CD and book stores. When I go to New York my travel itenerary basically consists of arriving around 10 a.m. on Sunday, parking in front of Academy Records on 18th Street, getting breakfast and showing up when Academy's doors open thereafter filling my car's trunk with used CDs (relax oh keepers of the digital copyright--Academy is almost all classical and opera CDs, which rank very, very, very low in the Napsterizing and CD-R world. Find me someone that has copied Schabel's Beethoven recordings and traded in the orginals.) I then proceed to the Strand bookstore on 11th (?) & Broadway--a half-block sized warehouse of used and remaindered books. Then onto St. Marks place, for further used CD and used book purchasing. Then on to the West Village for more of the same. Oh, and if I get done fast enough, I can stop at Princeton Record Exchange on the way home.) Anyway, to make a long story short, I'm 33 and the only difference from when I was 10 is that back then I was riding a bike around instead of a car and I was riding around Hollywood, FL instead of NYC.

The reason the Writer's Guild's petition is so ridiculous is that used books shopping has been the regular course of behavior for book collectors back a few generations. Find me a real writer that didn't spend most of their pre-royalty check days trolling used bookstores and, likely, working in them. Particularly genre writers, who live in the places.:)

It was riding my bike around from store to store twenty years ago that I found the Lensmen and Skylark series by E.E. Smith, back before I realized they were unreadable. ;) Harlan Ellison's stuff, Phil Dick's surreal novels, Asimov, Clarke etc. etc. etc. When I got interested in politics, there for a buck a copy were Ted White's presidential campaign books, Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, history books by the hundreds.

I rememebr times my backpack was so weighed down with used books that I had to be careful turning corners that I wouldn't tip my bike over.

Used book shopping is completely ingrained in the book collector's behavior. Suggesting that used books be driven off of amazon is like suggesting that people shouldn't buy in thrift stores because of all the jobs it costs poor textile workers, and think of the manufacturing jobs lost in North Carolina when people buy used or antique furniture!! It's just silly--go to any writer's place and were did their books (at least the non-promotional copies) come from? Used bookstores.

Amazon's practice of selling used copies side-by-side with the new copies isn't even a new idea. Jeez, Powell's in Portland, OR has been doing it for decades--Amazon probably got the idea from Powells.

For anyone not familiar with Powells (and if you aren't you shouldn't be posting on this topic anyway): the fellow that owns Powells opened a book store in Portland after his son opened a store in Chicago. Dad didn't know much about selling books, and didn't know that used books are supposed to be shelved separately from new books. So he shelved them together. He also couldn't see how multiple used copies could be priced the same--the more copies that show up on the used shelf the less desirable the book, so each extra copy should be priced a little less than the one before it. So Dad went on his merry, stupid way. The main Powell's store now takes up a city block in Portland, burrowing its way through the existing buildings on the block in such a fashion that they publish a map of the store to guide you around its catacombs. Powell's and Strand are the Meccas of the East and West Coast for book nuts.

Amazon's sales look to me like just the Powell's system brought online, which makes some since as Powells is one of the online stores Amazon competes against. Other online used book sources are the Advanced Book Exchange, bookfinder and alibris. ABE and bookfinder are searchable databases of used bookstores around the country, which albiris is a (sometimes pricey) centralized fulfillment warehouse where people send their used books for sale (also used book sellers that have gotten tired of running stores or going from flea market to flea market just put their inventory there for sale.) I have purchased _many_ books through Powells and bookfinder. Too bad Portland is a little far from Philadelphia--wandering around the store is a great time.

Anyway, I've rambled on and on, but one final point, and it has been made earlier in the discussion--unlike digital media, there is no cost-effective way to duplicate printed media while turning the original into a used store. When you see a book in a used store, or on amazon's used lists, it means someone has deemed the book disposable and is relinquishing all interest in the book. Same as a table, or used car, or sofa, they're giving up the whole thing and the buyer has the only instance of that copy running back to the original purchase. The point? The only way used sales can make a dent in new sales of the work is if a large enough percentage of previous purchasers deem the book disposable and not worthy of keeping. If enough purchasers of your book believe it isn't worth keeping, then maybe you should loose out on some royalties! After all, I still have those Phil Dick and Harlan Ellison books I bought when I was 12 (nothing a 7th grade teacher likes more than seeing a student reading "Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled" during study period). I still have the same $2 used Book Club Edition copy of Lathe of Heaven I bought years ago after seeing the PBS movie. (Too bad I loaned the Lensmen books to someone that never returned them, and then bought the new printings last year when I was then old enough to realize they were unreadable!) The idea that someone who doesn't want a book should be stuck either a) throwing it in the trash or b) using it to get the fireplace started is offensive. Better the book should be taken to Ye Used Booke Store or sold through amazon to someone that want it.

By the by, I checked amazon and, for example, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which sold 60,000 copies just from Amazon pre-orders a couple of years ago, has a grand total of 72 copies available used--.12% of just the number pre-ordered from one source, amazon. Guild member Judy Blume's Blubber, which the Judemeister has been earning royalties on for 26 years, has a grand total of 22 used copies available. I think Judy's gonna make the car payment without a problem from amazon.

TYPO, whats new with my postings

its ABEBooks.com

Of course, I still have 'em, and whenever I move that is the chief headache. But, even if they didn't have a certain intrinsic value to me, I couldn't toss 'em because bibliophiles seem to value them. (that is pretty pricey; Needful Things seems to have aquired some of my private documents, too, though, I can't for the life of me remember to whom I gave that stuff).

An E-Book would ease my moving burden, and eradicate the collector's market. Good thing? Bad thing? I don't know. I would miss the "feel" of a book, its heft in my hand that still gives me a feeling of having accomplished something by writing it. I'd say that's priceless, but a credit card company fucked that word up.

Of course, I still have 'em, and whenever I move that is the chief headache. But, even if they didn't have a certain intrinsic value to me, I couldn't toss 'em because bibliophiles seem to value them. (that is pretty pricey; Needful Things seems to have aquired some of my private documents, too, though, I can't for the life of me remember to whom I gave that stuff).

An E-Book would ease my moving burden, and eradicate the collector's market. Good thing? Bad thing? I don't know. I would miss the "feel" of a book, its heft in my hand that still gives me a feeling of having accomplished something by writing it. I'd say that's priceless, but a credit card company fucked that word up.

(I sure wish I knew what "love poem" I wrote in that fourth one, you'd think that would bring more of a premium.)

eBay, on the other hand, is an entirely different can of worms. Buyers (and, alas, sellers) range from the very knowledgeable to the completely ignorant. For science fiction first editions, most of the people I know on there will open another window and search for a particularly interesting item on ABE before bidding on eBay. But there are many people who will bid several times what an item is listed for on ABE just because they don't know about the latter.

This is not to say that ABE has completely replaced the local speciality bookseller. For example, I still buy quite a few things at Adventures in Crime and Space, Austin's local SF shop, because I know the owners, its convienant, and many times you see things browsing that you wouldn't know to look for. But many speciality shops are themselves on ABE, especially given the tough post 9/11 business climate.

A free bookbuying tip: Many times, the exact same copy of a used book listed on ABE will show up on Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com, but at 2-5 times the price listed on ABE. That's because ABE has "affiliate" programs that allow such books to be listed on those services, but B&N and Amazon always jack the price up to give themselves a hefty profit margin.

As for conclusions beyond the world of books: Whenever possible, use search engines that give you listings from many different dealers. (It also helps if you have a service like ABE that kicks dealers off if they receive too many complaints.)

I keep recommending these books to people I meet. It's wonderful literature; I keep saying it's literature, not deserving the restrictive label of "SF"; a good Strugatsky is the kind of book you don't fully appreciate until you have put it down, when its flavour lingers and you realize that, while reading it, your mind took flight, and that you're still flying a few days after.

It is sad, but not too surprising, to learn how unknown they are outside the literati (by which I don't mean the average Slashdot geek type with their Asimov and Trekkie stuff). The English translations are, as far as I can know, almost entirely out of print. Roadside Picnic was recently resurrected, at least in Europe, by Gollancz as part of their "Gollancz SF" series (instantly recognizable as trade-paperbacks with minimalistic yellow covers), a wonderful series which also includes other semi-forgotten masterpieces by the likes of Brunner, John Sladek, Heinlein, Thomas Disch and John Crowley.

Obtaining these absent volumes is not hard. ABE Books is your friend; basically it's a network of used-book sellers with a unified shopping cart -- it's an amazing system that has significantly added to my personal library. Books typically arrive by air mail within a week, even here in Europe (Norway). Also popular, but untested by me, is BookFinder.

There have been posts in this discussion, some serious and some not, about the readability/relevance of Russian fiction, comments pretty typical of ethnocentric Americans. I can't stress this enough: There is absolutely nothing that should prevent you from completely enjoying a Russian book (translated into English, to wit). The references to Russian culture/history/etc. are more or less nonexistent, and their stories are usually set outside the Soviet state. As for translations, most of the Strugatsky books were done by an extraordinary translator, Antonina W. Buois. I cannot vouch for their correctness, as I have not read the original texts, but I applaud their beauty, humanity, subtlety and ingenuity, qualities which I can only assume are also present in the originals.

As for what to read, I highly recommend Roadside Picnic, which is a masterpiece in any genre (it served as the inspiration for Tarkovsky's Stalker). It is about the aftermath of an alien visitation -- after the beings themselves have left and mysteriously, without having revealed themselves -- which has left the Earth riddled with small "Zones", contaminated by alien debris. One theme of the novel is that while we humans consider ourselves "rational beings", our sense of rationality -- a way of putting order to chaos -- is closely tied to our human form; an alien civilization may in fact appear beyond our capacity to understand, and therefore their nature will seem chaotic, irrational and impossible to us. The debris is wonderful stuff, often dangerous, often inexplicable, and humans scavenge it like ants over the trash left, as a character says, by a family "roadside picnic".

Their other works are similarly masterly: Far Rainbow, Hard to Be a God (actually made into a French-German-Russian-produced film in 1989) and Definitely Maybe. The latter's original title is, translated: "A Billion Years to the End of the World: A manuscript discovered under unusual circumstance". It tells the story of how one day all scientific progress is suddenly threatened by, well, hedonistic distractions. It was adapted into the film Days of the Eclipse (1988).

Many of the Strugatskys' books play out in the same "universe", or continuum, of the 22nd century, which includes several novels featuring intergalactic investigator Maxim Kammerer, and also developing the backstory of "the Wanderers", a mysterious, never-seen, incredibly powerful race of beings that seem to be silently following and manipulating the human race, similar to the Visitors in Roadside Picnic. The most chilling example is "Wanderers and Travellers", a hypnotic little short story about a diver who tags rare marine animals with radio tracking, and who then meets a man who suspects that, after a visit to a remote planet, he has somehow been... tagged himself.

On note: Alongside their SF production, the Strugatskys also produced some absurdist fables, including Tale of the Troika and The Second Invasion of Mars, and while this is great stuff, it's likely to shock and disappoint anyone looking for a "vintage Strugatsky".

go here for out of print books

A quick search of AbeBooks turned up a lot of hits, both in its first release in Binary Star #5 (along with George R.R. Martin's Nightflyers), in an illustrated version and in True Names and Other Dangers but, unfortunately, it looks like the story has become "collectible" (and thus expensive as hell). It's a great read, but I'm glad I have my copy and don't have to shell out $50 to $120 for it. Perhaps the local library?