There's a Half Price Books that opened in downtown Concord, in the location that Wolf Cameras had been. I went there last week -- lots of space filled with books and lots of people milling about -- and bought a bunch of books. Actually, not everything is half price anymore. A lot is, but a lot isn't either. In fact, some of the recent used paperbacks I bought were cover price. Hmm, if I'm paying cover price why am I buying a used book?

In any case, I picked up a couple of computer books. They have a surprisingly mostly current selection of used computer books. I'm so used to seeing really old technical books at used book stores, but they had books from early this year. I got an O'Reilly book on SQL and some obscure Java Telephony book. The Java Telephony book is pretty bad, and I could tell that when I flipped through it at the bookstore, but I still bought it since it was cheap and there were no other books on JTAPI (Java Telephony Application Programming Interface).

It's one of those books where the author is just conversationally talking about computer telephony and computer telephony products. At least in the beginning, later on it covers JTAPI. I've read technical books like these, ones that read like an advertisement and pep talk on the technology. It was written in 1997 and it's funny as I read the different telephony vendors chapter -- so many of them are out of business or were bought out by larger companies. Not an impressive book.

I tried looking for a good online used book site that I can browse and buy books, but I didn't find any. The Half Price Books site only has hardcover books. Half.com (owned by eBay) is basically eBay with fixed prices, which means that buying 10 books from 10 people kills you in shipping. Alibris (owned by Barnes and Noble) is one store but tends to specialize in hard covers and collectibles. And since it's Barnes and Noble it probably means that they ship stuff piecemeal. Bibliofind (owned by Amazon) is nice it that it collates from a lot of book stores, but once again shipping will kill you if you're not careful.

I can see how Half Price Books would have a problem keeping an online book database up to date. They buy and sell thousands of books a day and they'd have to keep track of different printings and the stores don't seem that organized, though the one in Concord is pretty good. For now there are no good online places for used books, unless you are looking for something special. And since most of the books I read are trashy paperback pocketbooks, looks like I'll be going to more used book stores.

Speaking of used books, I don't remember if I mentioned it but Mile High Comics holds a lot of sales. It's usually 30% off, sometimes 40% and usually a good time to buy commics. Now, other than a duplicate shipment and the occasional wrong comic book shipped, I've had no problems with MHC. Not that surprisingly, they're very popular, and their prices have been going up, way up. Enough so that the "40% off sale" is not that much less than what the regular price was a year ago. And these are used comic books that were way overprinted.

Still, they do have a good inventory so I bought some more stuff today. It's a 40% off Thanksgiving sale. Actually, a lot of the comics I bought were more like 50% or 60% off, which makes it better than the local comic book store. I'm trying to collect the Avengers and I'm in the mid-300's working down. A lot of those comics are $5 regular price for New/Mint. Now, I can get those at my comic book store for $2 to $3 each. But on sale they were more like $1.50 to $2, which makes it worth it, especially since I first started with comic books that my local store didn't have. Shipping though makes up for the extra savings. So really, for a used comic book shopper, try your local stores first, especially if you already go to them to buy comics.