Browsing The Musty Shelves Of Amazon.com

Seattlest has a an unfortunate tendancy to think everyone is us. Just because we use Amazon.com to enrich book-of-the-moment fiction writers by hopping on various booklist bandwagons and to screw the estates of legendary dead scribes by hunting down $0.75 copies of their opened veins via the used section doesn't mean that that's what everyone else does. Ok, we've been known to drop a non-fiction book in the cart every once in awhile, more as a lark than anything. Usually we delete it before we checkout. You know how many tattered short story anthologies you can get for the price of a new non-fiction book?

Apparently there's a big market for something called a "professional and technical" book, though. Are those really even books? It is words printed on pages between two covers, but we feel there's something metaphysically separating a book and a book.

According to this Java thingy, though, Amazon.com sells books. Far and away the largest segment of Amazon's stock is "professional and technical." That contains things like "Law" with subcontainers of "contracts" and "domestic relations." We wouldn't have guessed that there are as many mathematics books for sale at Amazon as there are items of contemporary literature. This is a fun thing to explore even if it doesn't exactly bear out Seattlest's preconceptions about the stacks at Amazon.com.