Workin' at the karma wash

Today I picked up some valuable karma points but missed a significant sale on out-of-print books.

A requester from Los Alamos National Laboratory wanted two copies of a book on explosives published in 1980; he was pretty vague about the title, didn't know the author, knew that "LASL" was in the title somewhere, and provided nine digits of the 10-digit ISBN. I told him that the book was probably out of print but that I'd be glad to search for a used copy of whatever it was.

So I got online and within a few minutes apparently found what he was looking for. Perry then stuck his head in the office and said the guy called back with the names of the editors. I was looking at the exact title he wanted: it was published in 1980; the names of the editors matched; the title of the book and the title he gave me were in the same alphabet. Woo-HOO! I used Google to find more about the book and found a site where he could download all 400+ pages in .pdf format for free, so I called him and gave him the link.

Then, just for fun, I consulted the websites of some of our third-party out-of-print vendors and found two copies of the book for $250 each, plus our surcharge. I was bummed because we could have made some serious coin on the sale, but I felt okay because the guy might spread the word that we were nice about finding what he needed.

(God, I hate being noble.)