Book Checks

Book Checks
We have two stages for checking books into stock at NHBS. Firstly all incoming books (several hundred per day) are unpacked, checked for damage and entered into stock. We then carry out ‘Book Checks’ – items which haven’t been into stock before are passed to the Catalogue Manager so that she can check that title, author and other bibliographic details are correct. This is also a great chance for us to see what’s new, what’s better than expected or, in some cases, not quite what had been described. It’s the life-blood of what we do – ensuring accurate information and physically checking the books we recommend to you. Walking through the office yesterday I spotted this pile of Book Checks working their way through the system:

Freshwater Fishes of Costa Rica… at last

Freshwater Fishes of Costa RicaFreshwater Fishes of Costa Rica is the only decent book we can find on the non-marine fish of Costa Rica. It’s not new (it’s a 2002 reprint, this 2nd Ed published in 1998) but it is now in stock – I mention this because we have been waiting for it to come into stock for a year! This is a long wait… but well worth it. In Portuguese and English, Bussing has provided a high level of taxonomic, physiological and ecological information, there are good maps and diagrams, as well as some reasonable colour and black & white images. You may also be interested in the Check List of Fishes of South and Central America.

New features on nhbs.com

We have added some new features on www.nhbs.com which provide you with more information about our books, DVD’s and other products while you are browsing and searching the site.
Gift Vouchers

Images
There are now multiple images for many books – we’ve scanned inside most top-selling titles where we feel extra images will help you make a decision about the artwork, plates or maps in the book you’re considering. Where it might be useful, we’ll also scan the back of the book. Books like Beneath the Surface have excellent artwork on the jacket, but seeing samples of the stunning illustrations inside make it much easier to decide whether you want to buy the book.

For wildlife equipment such as Nest Box Camera Kits, we are including images of the product in use together with additional information on accessories. The pages for the Nest Box Camera Kits also include sample video footage obtained from these kits.

Contents
We also added a contents tab to some of our book pages – we’ll be putting this in whenever we can get it electronically in advance of publication.

Reviews
NHBS staff are busy reading Nature, New Scientist, Science, Scientific American, BBC Wildlife and dozens of other journals and magazines on your behalf to pick out reviews of key titles. Not all natural history titles get reviews but where they do, and if we spot them – we’ll put them up on the site.

Author Bio
Sometimes we can add a short author biography – we’ll do this when a decent source is available.

Future Developments
It would be very interesting to hear whether you would like to read and contribute Customer Reviews to www.nhbs.com – it’s a feature we are thinking about. Please do leave comments via the blog or drop us an email.