Charlie Stross

[tigerfort]

I've now read the first four volumes of Charlie's "Merchant Princes" series - which is to say that, in his original plan, I'm halfway through book 2. Unfortunately, I don't have copies of volumes five and six, and the Oxfordshire libraries website informs me that the only copies available on-shelf are in Witney, Henley, and Banbury, all of which are about as far away from me as it's possible to get while remaining within Oxlib. So if anyone is able to lend me "Trade of Queens" and "The Revolution Business", I'd be very grateful. Otherwise I'll just have to keep an eye out and wait for the city library copies to be in.

On a faintly related note, one of our local charity shops has a copy of the UK paperback of "Saturn's Children" for a pound, if anyone needs it? (I picked up a near-mint hardback of said book in the same shop for 50p a month or so ago. No, I don't understand their pricing either.)

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

the only copies available on-shelf are in Witney, Henley, and Banbury

This is what inter-library loans are for! :) i.e. the city library should be able to order them in for you.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

You forget that I'm tightpoor; the charge for an inter-library loan is a couple of quid per book, plus normal reservation fee (about a pound per volume). For the cost of ILLing both, I could buy the first one new in paperback.... So thanks for the suggestion, but I'm afraid I regard it as a bit pricey for this (which is not to say that I think the service is overpriced, because there's going to be considerable cost in labour and hassle, just that it's not worth it for normal fiction books).

[j4.livejournal.com]

Ah OK, sorry, didn't realise they cost that much these days! :-(

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

'Twas a fair comment; I should probably have mentioned that I'd looked at the possibility and decided it wasn't sensible in the original post.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Do they really count "fetch it from another branch" as ILL rather than just a reservation? I'm surprised at that...

The other four I could do, but my copy of Revolution Business is in Edinburgh, and TOQ was on the "buy when in the US this summer" list, so both are out from this end!

[freya-9.livejournal.com]

Merchant Princes series is amazing :) Hope you can find the next one ok!

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Given the choice of cheap(ish) books, I'd almost always be more likely to pick up the paperback for space-on-shelf/weight-in-hand reasons, and I'm sure I'm not alone. So pricing the hardback significantly lower may well be their best bet at shifting it. Quite possibly other types of hardback, eg cookery books(?) may sell better as harder-wearing and so be priced more? Seems sensible market-forces to me, just because hardbacks are *originally* priced higher doesn't mean 2nd-hand hardbacks are easy to shift without lower prices.

(Alternatively, their pricing may be entirely random :-) But many charity shops now do have a dedicated book-sorting/pricing person - my sister-in-law volunteers as one - so there probably is some policy.)

I'm sure you're thought of this, and I don't know Oxon's policies, but some libraries have reduced/waived fees for certain things which may include reservations etc for disabled users. Worth asking if they do and whether you'd qualify? (I don't know how 'officially' disabled one has to be, and whether you currently count as that - I currently do not, beaurocracy being what it is, but some things let you self-define to greater or lesser degree.)