Playing With The Search Feature
In response to
Dirk
Deppey's concern that the copy of
Sanctuary I bought at
Half Price Books was remaindered: I don't think it was.
Usually the remaindered books have what look like computer-printed
labels with bar codes on them, whereas other books have smaller,
individually-printed sticky price tags. I've always assumed the
latter type of books were ones brought in by customers, not unsold
stock from the publishers. I've also found that remaindered books
seem to appear on the
Half
Price Books website. So stuff like
the
stacks of
CrossGen's
Compendia, shelves of
ComicsOne
manga (which interestingly list "Diamond Comic Distributors" as the
publisher), and piles of
Safe
Area Gorazde were probably remaindered books (especially since
the detail page for each book says "Publisher's Overstock"). But
I'm guessing the single copies of various Tokyopop and Dark Horse manga
I saw were just individual used books sold by customers.
Perhaps we can use the Half Price Books site as an anecdotal tool to
see which graphic novels are doing well in the bookstores. I was
surprised that the site didn't list any of Marvel's hardcovers, since I
saw several copies of
Ultimate X-Men vol. 1 and the
Hulk
and
X-Men Encyclopedias in the store. (Perhaps they were
all from a collector who expected the books to become "hot" a couple
weeks after their release.) But it is nice to know I can buy back
issues of
Ultimate Spider-Man and signed copies of
Maximum
Clonage online.
