I'll reply, but honestly I'm not sure that this conversation is worth continuing further.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdp
It is certainly a good thing if the employee can contribute to the Exploration side and give good advice. But in that post about "you cannot have all of them, but try to have a very good, proper selection" I stated that if you cannot have many volumes (>100k), try at least to be specialized (in your <10k). You do not have the Chandler, ok I do not mind at all if you properly try to propose a Hammet. Still, a place where to get the Chandler remains of need - and useful when you are searching. But if your selection is such that you get - that is what your space allowed: Hammet yes, Chandler no, Huxley yes, Orwell no, Le Goff yes, Duby no, Malthus yes, Ricardo no, Schelling yes, Hegel no, Peano yes, Frege no - then you are managing a lottery, not a bookstore.
|
You said yourself: no book store can have everything in stock at all times. You go into a store looking for Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister. They don't have the book in stock. I would hope the clerk (if they were knowledgeable, no clerk knows everything about every subject) would recommend something comprable instead of just saying "we don't have it."
Not sure why that is even worth discussing?
George Orwell's 1984 is a classic that is always in stock. But when I worked in a book store and a class had 1984 assigned to read over a two month period, in the last three days of that period, the store would sell out of 1984. Because invariably the students (and their parents) all rushed to the store at the last minute to grab a copy. Yes, I'm sure some of them thought "this store sucks! They don't even have a copy of 1984!" But of course, there are reasons the store is out.
Now, in the case of it being required for a school read, recommending Huxley wouldn't help. But if someone was looking to read the book out of personal interest, I think recommending Huxley's Strange New World (your original complaint) would be entirely reasonable.