About Header Books

We sell one kind of book, and we sell it properly.

Header Books stocks technical and professional titles in Kathmandu, starting with O'Reilly Media. Every copy is an original edition, bought through authorised distributors.

Where the name comes from

A header is the file a programmer puts at the top of their work. It is the place where you name what you are borrowing instead of building again: someone has already solved this, it has been tested, and you can stand on it.

A good technical book does the same job over a longer timescale. Somebody spent four years learning something the hard way and then eighteen months writing it down clearly. You read it in a week. That trade is the best deal in this industry, and it is what the shop is for.

The problem we are here to fix

If you have bought a programming book in Nepal, you know the object. The cover is convincing and nothing behind it is.

Code listings go soft after a few generations of photocopying, so a lowercase l and a digit 1 stop being different shapes. Diagrams that used colour to carry meaning arrive in four shades of grey. Pages go missing, and you find out in chapter nine.

That is not a cheaper book. It is a book that cannot do the one job a technical book has, which is to be read accurately when you are stuck.

What we do about it

We buy through authorised distributors, which means the publisher is paid and the author is paid. We stock a narrower list than a general bookshop would, because a shelf of everything helps nobody choose. And we keep them here, in Kathmandu, so the book you want is a few days away rather than six weeks and a customs queue.

Who this is for

Engineers who have been working for a few years and have hit the edge of what they picked up on the job. Students who would rather learn a subject properly once. Teams who need four people reading the same thing.