Yesterday, I went into Barnes & Noble armed with a shiny new gift card. I was locked and loaded, ready to purchase a book on jQuery. I have done a lot with jQuery but I really would like to sit down and read a book on the topic so I fully understand the syntax and capabilities of jQuery. Unfortunately, it was not as easy as I expected. I arrived in the programming section to find they didn’t have any jQuery books in stock. Disappointed, I started searching book by book hoping there was one out of place. My search did not yield any results. I got close, this particular Barnes & Noble stocked 3 books on Dojo but for some reason they had no jQuery in stock. They also stocked 13 varieties of JavaScript books and about 24 JavaScript/Ajax books and yet not on jQuery. Why they have so many different JavaScript books and no jQuery books is beyond me.

This got me thinking. In Meatball Sunday by Seth Godin, makes an interesting point. He says:

If you examine the sales of the 150,000 titles in a big store, you’ll see that they account for perhaps half of Amazon’s book sales. In other words, if you aggregate the millions of poorly selling titles on Amazon, they add up to the total sales of all the bestselling books in the physical world put together.

While it isn’t shocking news the big box retailers stock only the most popular products. It is somewhat shocking the number of non best sellers that sell on Amazon. I love books, I love shopping at Barnes & Noble and the Internet cannot replace the feeling of thumbing through all of those new books, although, they are trying. The Internet does have some very powerful advantages. The first is obviously selection. A quick query on Amazon.com shows several different books on jQuery. Another benefit of online shopping is user reviews. Right next to each of these titles are useful reviews on the quality of the book that help greatly in making the right selection. I would argue that even though I can’t hold and feel the book the online excerpts and reviews may be more useful in terms of making a purchasing decision.

This is why the Internet is winning. You can get what you want any time of the day. I would argue that if there was a way to get your book immediately from Amazon.com Barnes & Noble would eventually cease to exist, or would become a glorified coffee shop. These brick and mortar like stores like Barnes & Noble better work hard to block future developments in matter transfer technology or they’re toast!

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Bear Bibeault – jQuery in Action [ILLUSTRATED]
Seth Godin – Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
Mark Lutz – Learning Python, 3rd Edition
Jack H Grossman – Becoming a Successful Manager : How to Make a Smooth Transition from Managing Yourself to Managing Others
Seth Godin – Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?
Donald Sparkman – Selling Graphic and Web Design

If you can think of some others I should include please let me know…

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I have always admired Warren Buffett as a businessman.  In the often unethical world of business he has managed to construct a sustainable empire based on ethical business practices and sound investment policies.  As a finance student I spent a great deal of time analyzing his methodology.  Over the years I have read a number of books and articles about Warren Buffett and his investment style. I have enjoyed reading about Warren predicting the fall of over priced tech stocks prior to the burst of the tech bubble. I also remember reading in Berkshire Shareholder letters Warren Buffett’s prediction in 2006 of future problems in the housing market, the same ones we are now experiencing.  It is easy to see how investors and society can easily get caught up in these bubbles and in retrospect his point of view makes perfect sense and matches perfectly with the strategy that has made him the world’s richest man. The hard part is avoiding the trends in the first place.

Anyway, I am very anxious to start reading The Snowball.  I will report back here for whoever may be interested.  The book is quite long so I would imagine I will be working on it for awhile. For now, I am going to go start reading about Warren Buffett the anomaly.

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