I would also recommend dvdpricesearch.com
. Not too many coupons listed (probably b/c there aren't many out there), but their price search engine is pretty extensive.
Man, I remember the good ol' days in 1999, early-2000 when e-tailers were selling at a loss and hoping to make it up on volume. The best DVD deal I got was when one store decided to sell everything in their store at 55% off their regular (not MSRP) prices. Their server almost collapsed under the load, but I managed to fill my virtual cart full of stuff and so ended up getting the Criterion Collection version of "Brazil" for less than $15:)
Yeah, I love Hamilton too and have been buying from them for over 10 years now. Plus with their flat rate shipping fee ($3.50), it's always fun to stock up on lots of huge, 1000 page reference books selling for only $1.95, even if you're not sure you'll ever need them (irrigation fluid dynamics?).
Still, Hamilton is best only when you want a book on a particular topic but don't really care which one. If you're trying to find a specific title you are most likely not going to find it unless it just finished a print run.
I recently read an
article which talks about Blair's plans to raise tuitions in order to make British universities more competitive. Like with healthcare, it seems to be a trade-off between cost and quality. In the United States, universities set their tuitions based on the actual costs of teaching and how competitive they want to be as research institutions. These costs are directly passed on to students, leading to tuition inflation of about 10%/year, which the government helps offset by offering billions of $'s in subsidized loans.
In Europe the model seems to be to subsidize universities directly and so tie their growth to the growth in the education budget; this has kept tuitions down and made them almost universally affordable, but also limited the competitiveness of schools in that there is no way to grow departments/programs beyond what a naturally stingy government is willing to pay for.
Not a slam against them, just an aknowledgement of the inherent trade-offs in these things.
Here is the opening paragraph of the article:
BRISTOL, England -- Eric Thomas, vice chancellor of the University of Bristol, grows almost misty-eyed when he speaks of the modern science labs, expanded libraries and new classroom buildings he saw on a recent visit to Penn State and three other public universities in the United States.
"You suddenly understand what the fruits of sustained investment in higher education, decade after decade after decade, can really deliver," he said.
By contrast, Bristol and Britain's 86 other universities, all of which are state institutions whose budgets are set largely by the government, contend they have steadily lost ground financially over the past two decades.
If you can read 5 pages of text per search, couldn't you just continually search for a phrase on the 5th page, allowing you to read any book for free with a decent amount of effort?
Even better, it returns all pages containing a certain word or phrase, so that if it's very common you basically get the whole book returned by your search.
I used this gimmick yesterday to read "Lord of the Rings" by searching on 'Frodo'. Was really glad to finally read the book, but kinnda pissed off that that hack Peter Jackson tampered with it so much in "Two Towers" by inserting that stupid, made-up battle into it.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I remember the good ol' days in 1999, early-2000 when e-tailers were selling at a loss and hoping to make it up on volume. The best DVD deal I got was when one store decided to sell everything in their store at 55% off their regular (not MSRP) prices. Their server almost collapsed under the load, but I managed to fill my virtual cart full of stuff and so ended up getting the Criterion Collection version of "Brazil" for less than $15 :)
Yeah, I love Hamilton too and have been buying from them for over 10 years now. Plus with their flat rate shipping fee ($3.50), it's always fun to stock up on lots of huge, 1000 page reference books selling for only $1.95, even if you're not sure you'll ever need them (irrigation fluid dynamics?).
Still, Hamilton is best only when you want a book on a particular topic but don't really care which one. If you're trying to find a specific title you are most likely not going to find it unless it just finished a print run.
Also, try projectorcentral.com
In Europe the model seems to be to subsidize universities directly and so tie their growth to the growth in the education budget; this has kept tuitions down and made them almost universally affordable, but also limited the competitiveness of schools in that there is no way to grow departments/programs beyond what a naturally stingy government is willing to pay for. Not a slam against them, just an aknowledgement of the inherent trade-offs in these things.
Here is the opening paragraph of the article:
I used this gimmick yesterday to read "Lord of the Rings" by searching on 'Frodo'. Was really glad to finally read the book, but kinnda pissed off that that hack Peter Jackson tampered with it so much in "Two Towers" by inserting that stupid, made-up battle into it.