Why are Pratchett's "Science of Discworld" books so hard to find in the U.S.?

The Science of Discworld

The Science of Discworld II: The Globe

The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch

The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day

They’re not really novels – each has a Pratchett-written plot involving the wizards of UU, but it’s just a framing-device for scientific exposition. By far most of the text was written by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen.

Barnes & Noble does not carry them and apparently never has. I’ve read SODWII and SODWIII but I had to get them by interlibrary loan and it took months; still waiting for SODWI and I requested it more than six months ago; can’t get SODWIV on ILL because the Tampa-Hillsborough library system won’t do ILL on any book less than a year old. SODWI is not even on Amazon any more except in Kindle format, and when the book was available there it priced at a hundred dollars or more for a mass-market paperback.

Why have these books not been published/marketed in the U.S.?!

I’ve been wondering that as well. I managed to find the second and third (I think I found them at a used bookstore), but I’ve had no luck with the first or the new one.

Maybe if you sent the Librarian a banana…

It looks like it was published by an English publisher. Pratchett is a major author in the UK (before J.K. Rowling came along, he was the UK’s most popular author) while in the US he is just another niche author – solid, but not known outside the fantasy ghetto.

It’s likely his US publisher (HarperTorch at the time the Science of Discworld books came out) didn’t see enough of a market for it.

Not sure if market research would show that books about abiogenesis and evolution would not go down so well Ststeside - and large parts of the books are about just that. But I gather that authors like Dawkins and Hitchens aren’t hard to find at all, so it’s not likely to be that.

And yet B&N has a whole big section of popular-science books.

Amazon.co.uk - all of them are in stock. Amazon.com’s consignment section has paperbacks and trade paperbacks. There was one paperback of the first SoDW for $9.22.

They’re out there, but not really marketed in the US.

I didn’t check to see if my hardbacks would be worth $$, because I’m not parting with them.

Thanks. Will try that.

a diligent search of the web will find them…

How well do his science books sell in the UK, as compared to his fiction?