Has your Borders bookstore disbanded its IT books section?

[Deja Q]

The one I go to all the time did so within a 1 week timeframe; I was shocked to see it had been replaced with kiddie anime stuff.

A handful of books remain, but this suggests people are ditching IT. And rightly so given the attitudes of the corporate executives... and Borders, at least my location, feels they are no longer PROFITABLE. Which is why they dumped the section. (which is also why people aren't studying IT anymore...)

[brokensymmetry]

1. Don't know about Border's...

but ACM keeps talking about a 60% decline in enrollments in IT/CS over the last 4 years. They seem to think it can change. With outsourcing as it is, there isn't a chance.

As for me, I have a MSc degree in CS. I've pretty much concluded it isn't worth a bucket of day-old spit. It looks as if I should have studied something useful....say, Latin, or History of the Middle Ages.

[Deja Q]

2. Why do these execs think it can change?

Can they not see beyond the edge of their balance sheet?

Even that slimespitter bill gates tells us we need to take courses in computers and engeineering. Meanwhile he continues to offshore; business as usual... the filthy traitor also "diversified" (ditched the dollar) in January 2005 because he saw that at some point, it'd be worthless.

So I'm staying with open source and not giving those vermin another fuckin' penny.

[LoZoccolo]

6. I think Microsoft has started to outsource its development support too.

I submit a lot of incidents about the Office object model, and I've noticed that I don't see a lot of the old names I used to when the techs reply, but I see a lot of Indian ones. They also appear to be inexperienced and following some sort of "procedure" whereby twice I've sent them a compilable, executable, stripped-down piece of sample code that demonstrates a problem concisely, with a set of steps to follow to reproduce the problem, and am rewarded with a tedious questionnaire of ten-plus questions about things like which particular build of Office and Windows I was running, indicating to me that they did not bother to run the sample code. It's also difficult to express dissatisfaction with their resolution and/or assertion that the behavior is not a bug with this set of inexperienced people; they don't have a sense of appropriate response that experienced development support would have.

[SpiralHawk]

5. Sic Transit Gloria IT/CS

eom

[Catch22Dem]

3. Haven't checked in a few months

Mine still had a pretty decent section. I have a BS in MIS and always go straight to the section with all the O'Reilly books...my personal favorites. Maybe I'll stop in this weekend and see how it looks.

[swag]

4. No, but my Borders has recently rearranged, making everything

nice and hard to find.

I will also note that their IT books always seem to have been freshly rearranged by a crack team of elementary school schizophrenics.

I do most of my geek book shopping at Powell's Technical Books.

[SeanQuinn]

7. I like both Anime and IT.

I go to Waldenbooks all the time, which is a subsidary of Borders for their anime and manga selection (I'm 13). It's second to none. I've not looked in there for IT books, as its a considerably smaller store, but I believe I've seen one or two.

However, when I go to an actual Borders, I look for historical, political, and technological books. I run Ubuntu Linux and am quite interested and have seen IT books, and a good lot of them at Borders.

As I'm thinking of it, Barnes and Noble had a big section of O'Reilly and Powell books, as well as their own in IT. I liked the Firefox and Gmail hacks book, too, quite interesting stuff.

[BlueWolf]

8. I've noticed declines

At the Borders stores in the Chicago area that I've been to, I have noticed notable declines in the IT section. Their IT sections used to be huge and very easy to find; now much smaller. I've also noticed it at Barnes and Noble stores. The other day I was looking for the IT section at a B&N, and I couldn't even find it; had to ask customer service. So it's finally happened, people are ditching IT. The USA will no longer be a technological leader at this rate, thanks to the whorish politicians sucking up to their corporate sponsors.

[DanCa]

9. Actually i am surprised that my borders doesn't have a blues section.

Every blues singer is in the rmb category. Is that normal?

[hunter]

10. It could be an internet thing too...

I like books, I really do, but with open source software especially I know I can probably find whatever answers I'm looking for on the net. It's difficult for me to shake the feeling that a book is a luxury.