Birmingham's Computer Bookshops Ltd goes titsup Birmingham-based tech book seller Computer Bookshops Ltd has failed to make it out of administration, and is being wound up. The company had become a fixture since setting up in 1978, and claimed a portfolio of more than 350,000 volumes by the time it had to call in the administrators in February 2014. Its properties included …
I've been buying books from Computer Manuals for about 20 years. In the days before Amazon they were the place to go to buy computer books from. Sadly, in the past few years, their range has fallen behind Amazon. The rise of ebooks can't have helped things either.
Sorry to see the company fold. I wish all their employees the best for the future.
PC Bookshop will soon sweep Amazon from the face of the Earth, remarking as it does so "Now the circle is complete"
Only in my dreams - I do miss the the smell of paper and fresh ink, and the excitement of finds when pouring through the bookstacks, and I wonder how to explain this lost world to my kids. But the flipside was being at the behest of the shops' (and distributors') best guesses about what to stock and at what levels (perhaps the sole copy of that serendipitous hit just waltzed out the door five minutes ago) - the kids will never understand just how ignorant we were of just how ignorant we were...
When I was starting my degree course, I remember a lecturer telling us "Don't bother with the Library. By the time the book is written, checked and published the information is out of date". While this wouldn't be true of more general works, I really can't see how a tech books specialist survived this long.
As one of life's prevaricators I had a bad habit of buying books as the first step to certification and changing career direction, but then never bothering to open the book, let alone to sit the exam.
As a result I had a couple of genuinely useful books that were continually referred to over the lifespan of a particular system and a larger pile of pristine text books for CCNA and the like that I never got round to using properly.
I find Google good for simple one-trick answers. But if I want more background to the solution, I have to 'fess that I'm a grumpy old fart and prefer a book. I have started moving more towards eBooks nowadays (So easy to carry around so many!) but it's still a book.
No a major part of the problem is the rate of churn and change in IT, which greatly limits the shelf life of traditional technical books in some subject areas:
For example:
Churn: books focused on specific products such as Office 2007 only really have a market whilst those products are in the market.
Change: I suggest the state-of-the-art of virtualisation and cloud has greatly changed since 2007 (when "Virtual Machines Companion" was published) and hence the relevance of the contents of these is similarly limited.
These effectively force us to use the internet to obtain current information (ie. google stuff) and also use it to rapidly (and cheaply) disseminate current information. However there are few (free) resources on the internet that will enable you to readily structure your learning so that you can get full coverage of a new subject.
Another part of the problem is the price of technical books, which I find typically retail for 60+ GBP. It's been nice to pick up a couple of books for under 20 GBP each when Amazon lists them at over 35 GBP. Given that Computer Manuals have extended their sale to the 19-May, it would seem that price is a big factor, the question is whether there is a viable business in retailing computer books at these sale prices.
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