There was a reason for this - Amazon's search engine at the time was very primitive, it didn't do stopwords, and one of its key metric was how many clicks something got in search results. So this book started to go viral, and people searched for it and clicked on it and that made it more likely to appear in more search results.
By the time I heard about it, any sufficiently vague query that contained the word "in" would suggest this to you. I got an email suggesting I search Amazon for "Pointers in C", and this book was the second result. So naturally I bought it.
• One of this year's more unlikely literary triumphs falls victim to its own success. Several readers who have visited Amazon's web site recently expressed surprise on finding, alongside stuff about Harry Potter and Delia Smith, a rousing four stars …
17th Dec 2000. Kate Bush This Woman's Work box set. Apparently the return window for this order closed on Dec 26th 2000, at which point I was still playing it on repeat.
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