![[OC] Academic textbooks being discarded from abandoned university buildings. More photos in post.](https://media.piefed.social/posts/3P/lr/3PlrLZZPYodyspS.jpg){kind=link}
Aberystwyth University closed one of its campuses a few years ago. The place has been left to rot, but recently they’ve started clearing the place out, and removing all the old scientific textbooks. Most of them look untouched. Wonder how much this lot would have set students back if buying new.
Not with textbooks. We bought textbooks required for courses. As for books in libraries…a huge number of thick volumes were indexes for manual searching. Modern university libraries are meeting rooms, everything was digitized over a decade ago.
No thanks to carrying around 15 kilos of physics and chemistry texts, or trying to chase one copy of a book in the library, then finding some ambitious asshole ruined the pages. We no longer waste money on paper journals and binding volumes every year. Old journals just took up space in research buildings. Storing, moving, indexing all that paper costs money.
I’ve never assigned a textbook for any of my courses, they are not current enough and science can leap month to month in some fields. Students access primary papers via institution open digital subscriptions. We are saving a lot of shoulder injuries.
In EUROPE?
Weird, I assumed that was the standard.
Ours the issue was they didn’t get enough copies for the number of students, like 15 copies for a class of 40 students
That’s weird. My university library had a copy of every assigned textbook (multiple for large classes). You could borrow it for an hour or two at a time which was great
My college library has many class texts on the reserve shelf. This allows students who might not be able to afford a personal copy of a text to borrow the text for a few hours or days (depending on the item’s lending policy).
Even when I was an undergrad, the campus library had textbooks on reserve. I mostly used this to access the questions from the current edition of the textbook, so I could use the cheaper previous edition. I promise you, Mechanical Stress Analysis doesn’t change much, year to year.
Today I learned: A textbook is not the same as a book, I suppose it’s fair since some books are not primarily focused on text. I hate this language so much it’s unreal.
On: “Modern university libraries are meeting rooms, everything was digitized over a decade ago.” This is demonstrably false, I’ll upload some photos of my university’s library here in two or three weeks when my holidays end.
They are the same as a book, a textbook is a subcategory of book.
Specifically a formal piece of writing that has the intent of imparting knowledge upon the reader