Half Price Books Outlet — Local services in Bloomington

Walked Through the Door, Fell in Love With the Lack of barnesNnoble Corporate Sterility.

Here, you can smell the scent of books not a faux-trendy café. I browsed contentedly for hours until the completely unobtrusive staff gently reminded customers that the store had been closed for 10 minutes. At that point, disaster struck! Which books should I keep, while must I truly return the coveted rest of the stack to the shelves??! In my greedy hands I had the final installment of a favorite SF authors first series, several of my favorite author's works collected in 4 different SF anthologies and a plethora of paperbacks by new authors in the hard SF field I'd heard of but couldn't afford to purchase Oh the torture! Luckily a kind employee of the store saw my distress and was obviously familiar with customers facing "outlet bookstore panic syndrome"(which never manifests inside corporate book stores or in consumer's homes, even on large so called outlet site's, whose name, in the interest of my I NOT being sued- and so shall help you out with a clue, is both a jungle AND a river, but I digress) the kind words of the store employee penetrated my abject misery as I looked more closely at the sign to which she had been gesturing: ALL HARDBACK BOOKS $2! And the NEXT sign: ALL PAPERBACKS $.50! I owe my increasingly expanding library of the ECLECTIC ALLto HALF PRICE BOOKS OUTLET. I apologize in advance that my ex- landlord hates us both for the inadvertent destruction of the initial built bookshelves in my former apartment. For anyone who treasures books AS THEY SHOULD BE READ, on real paper,...

This is my favorite brick and mortar book store! While Greenwood is closer, the prices and finds at the outlet in Bloomington are worth the extra distance for me. If you go, expect to wish you had more time to search the shelves. It is a very large store with the typical sections in a half price book store (with better prices) but there are additional discounted items in most every section. There are lots of deals to be found on any regular day, you only have to be willing to look (so give yourself time). Most items are $3 or less. There are also special days like $1 days where everything in the store is a dollar or less. Sign up for their emails so you can get information on their specials. If you are looking for something specific ask an associate. They are extremely friendly and helpful. They also know what is not on the floor yet or will double check for you.

I don't know if it's just this location being in a college town or if all outlets have this good of a selection but their inventory is particularly good for children's books and educational items. We homeschool and I find something that I am looking for every time. I also find a lot of good items that I didn't know about either but have been wonderful additions to our school. At .50¢-$3, it's not going to break the bank if you find something you want to try but might not work out. Definitely recommend stopping by anytime you are in the...

Let me start by saying I lived near Ft Wayne and I LOVE the Half Price Books store there. So when I moved to Bloomington and learned there was a Half Price Books here, I was excited. But it turned out to be a disappointment. Unfortunately, I guess being an Outlet store means they don't carry any current materials. They just get the old leftover stuff the other stores can't sell.

They have a large sales floor but there isn't really much merchandise. There are rows of tables at the front of the store with a jumbled up selection of books that just reminds me of a garage sale. I realize that any time you shop at HPB bit is a hit or miss chance that they will have what you want if you go in looking for a specific book, but the stock here is fairly outdated even just for browsing. The movie, video game, and vinyl offerings are pretty anemic. They have very little (almost none)of the fun collectible and novelty items I have seen at other HPB stores.

In a college town where students are always looking for cheap entertainment, I would have thought this would be a prime place to have a well stocked, appealingly merchandised store, with offerings but instead this place seems more like the leftovers from the local library book sale that took place 8 years ago. I'd love to see them lose the 'Outlet' part of their name if it meant they would be more like the HPB stores I've visited in...