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.
if anything these textbooks wont help, if they constantly make new editions adding removing, content, or updating stem/or other research.
These might just be dissertations or bound volumes of old journals. Textbooks often have some cover art whereas a lot of these don’t.
There’s a lot of old paper that gets very rarely consulted.
What university provides textbooks to students? Assuming this isn’t AI generated, there is one text dated 1999 - that’s way out of date for scientific texts.
Depends on the field, no? I am studying math as hobby and books from over a century ago do pretty well.
This…looks very AI to me. Maybe it’s not, but it just feels so uncanny.
Back when I was in school, me and my classmates were once tasked to help clear the old books from the library. There was a big dump truck under the library windows, and we were tasked to, essentially, throw books out of the window.
You can be damn sure I took some gems with me. Books should not end like this. But also, for a younger me, it was somewhat fun.
It’s good to be suspicious.
The company name on the side of the skip does check out though (they even hire skips of the exact model shown), which is a big point for them being real photos:
probably backstock from the store. Most of my professors expected every new class to re-buy the latest book for every class. The industry itself is rife with waste
It is morally correct to pirate college text books.
Did your university not have a library?
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.
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.
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.
Most do? There are higher concentrations of textbooks in some places like the library or bookstore, which do provide textbooks to students, but there will also be a ton of them spread throughout various offices and some classrooms. It’s no surprise to me that they could fill multiple dumpsters with just textbooks.
Though hopefully they don’t just trash all the furniture, as there could be millions worth of desks, chairs, tables, and shelving units, depending on how big the school is.
Textbooks are such a scam… There should be a law that requires a way to do assignments without the stupid books. You used to be able to go to the library and look at the text books… Now these stupid books have apps.
Sadly I think that reality is just an American one (I hope), in the UK I was either just given an old copy of the same textbook to keep or the ability to borrow it for the whole year from the library, depending on the book.
In the US, even if we buy a second-hand textbook, we still need to pay for the software that goes along with it. We’re scammed either way.
How out of date are they? If they’re college textbooks they were trash 1-2 years after publication because profs require the latest editions.
Depends on who your professor was. I worked as an engineering lecturer for a few years. I told my students that having a reference text can be invaluable as you move through your career. For certain kinds of engineering, this is absolutely true. Paper reference texts have little long-term value in computer engineering. But civil or mechanical engineering? The principles of material strength do not change. And that’s the kind of engineering I teach. So I really encourage students to get paper reference texts.
To facilitate this, I would always post homeworks that included scans of the full problems. I either wrote the problems from scratch or cut out problems from the textbook. It then told students to still buy the book, but buy a few editions back to get their reference text for a song. I still want my students to have a permanent physical book, but if you design your course right, they won’t need the newest edition.
plenty of teachers teach without textbooks.
Making these particular books worth even less
Fuuuuck wish we were there rn we would grab so many books
And do nothing with them.
Some textbooks might be still useful. I have several old math, physics, etc. books, they’re still very useful.
The old reason to get a newer text book is that it’s sometimes has a more clear explanation on a subject, or can include better diagrams and images. I remember looking at some older physics book and the info was so dense it made it hard to digest. This was ~2000 so books must have been from the 50s-70s
OMG absolutely, I stopped selling text books in my second year in Uni and I have used a number of them many times since, both professionally and personally.
This is very rage bait.
I guarantee that pile of is 50 copies of the fifth edition and the only difference between the fourth and fifth edition is the introduction by the asshole who wrote it telling you they can’t believe they are on the fifth edition of the text book he wrote 25 years ago.
Someone should rescue all those books and
donate them to a good causedestructively scan them to feed AI modelaThat’s honestly a good use case for out of date textbook which knowledge is not useful anymore.
No it isn’t if it has potentially wrong conclusions corrected in later editions. Isn’t that the sort of thing that contributes to hallucinations?
Can I toss a book of lewd poetry about chili in there first?
Wouldn’t that potentially poison the well with potentially outdated or incorrect information?
If it returns Pluto to its rightful status as a planet, I’ll allow it
Isn’t that the point?
Would be better than letting them get rained on and thrown away
I came across a similar sight once when I was at university. An old tenured professor had retired (or died) and they’d dumped his office in a bin like this. Was kinda sad to see. Especially the numerous phd thesis papers. I browsed a few. Many had been professionally bound and had sincere, handwritten inscriptions, thanking the professor for his guidance and advice, etc.
There was also hundreds of issues of a super old computing magazine that the guy had obviously subscribed to. I grabbed a couple for my coffee table cuz they’re retro and rad as hell. Someday I’ll take pics and post them to !computermag_covers@feddit.org
So you saved some texts for retro aesthetic coffee table books.
Sell them on eBay
It’s would cost a fortune to ship them. Librarians aren’t stupid, they know how to budget a library.
why, they are worthless crap.
Depending on what exactly they are, these books may be practically worthless. I recently looked into selling some of my old college textbooks (that were $50-100 each at purchase), and they currently list online for <$5 each. Old editions are of no use to current students, and there’s no demand for previous editions (while there’s a good deal of supply).
It’s mostly to do with testing questions changing every year, and nothing else. Which is gross and reason 8114 that academic publishing companies should have their boards vivisected.
Well training books for a specific examen get less relevant every 3 years or so as testing condition slightly evolve even if pass exams aren’t.
It really depends on the subject; mathematics for instance probably isn’t going to change much decade to decade, but psychology is changing constantly.
mathematics for instance probably isn’t going to change much decade to decade,
JFC that’s wrong.
Their tactic is to change the homework questions and reorder some stuff every year so they can force everyone to buy new textbooks.
The actual content changes very little.
Some professors will just copy the new questions and hand them out so kids can get used books.
The amazing profs will include practice question lists for multiple editions, but that’s a lot of work.
The good ones stick to one edition of the book for a number of years, so that you can buy used books.
The best profs provide a pdf of questions and don’t expect you to buy a book 😅.
I’ve never assigned a textbook. It’s the wrong way to teach science because no scientists consult textbooks.
Textbooks are about universities in a racket with publishers to sell books in their campus stores. Publishers don’t even pay authors on most textbooks.
These days they often don’t get a choice in the matter
Genetics: my professor was the text author. He said that the information in chapter [let’s pretend it’s # 27] was bleeding edge when he wrote it six months prior to publishing, but it was out of date by the time it published and was very out of date now, a year later.
He gave us all his notes on the current version of the chapter and told us about the research coming in a few weeks that up render his new chapter obsolete so don’t study too close.
I can’t imagine publishing an up to date genetics text
I’m guessing that the big books are old collections of scientific journals. Depending on the journal, you could have multiple of those tomes per year. These days scientists access journals digitally, so there’s little benefit to keeping the physical copies around in most cases
When I was selling my books one semester, the bookstore (which kindly repurchased texts in good condition) offered me a coupon for half off a mediocre pizza. For all my books that semester.
I did not take the coupon
Came here to say this. Most of these books are probably superseded by newer versions and/or already archived. Also, if these books have spent a lifetime untouched in a university, how useful are they, really?
They just take up space that could be used for more student study areas.
Considering AI companies are now buying up books written pre-2022, those should still have value.
They only need one book.
Yeah but these might come in handy in the future, when all you’ll find will be the 2+2=5, 0% woke editions
Would you mind crosspost this on !dumpsterdiving@slrpnk.net?
This is a very good content and work you’re doing here. Some textbooks goes quickly out of date. After 3~5 years some aren’t relevant enough to be still bought them rather that the last version so they cannot be handed down so much but a few hands down of a book can help so much financially. And there is still plenty of use for an out-of-date book.
No worries, done. I couldn’t see a way to crosspost from Piefed on the web, but Voyager on iOS seemed to let me do it no problem.
It don’t seems to have worked. I’m going to ping you under a comment that shows how to crosspost from PieFed on a mobile browser. The icon is the same on a computer.
That icon didn’t exist on Piefed on Safari on a Mac for this post when I was trying initially. After cross posting using Voyager on an iPhone, the icon is visible on the mobile version of the site. It shows that’s it’s been cross posted.
I finally see it. I don’t know why I didn’t before. Thank you for being patient with me (^_^)
This is a thing at my university (I work there). I talked to one of the library folks about it years ago. She explained that (a) they would like to keep way more of the books but there’s not enough funding to have the space or staff for it–our school is in constant and recently much more intense financial crisis, laying off all kinds of people (except deans and provosts); (b) a lot of this stuff literally nobody wants, like 4th and 5th and 10th copies of mediocre textbooks rehashing the content done much better by other texts, and © yes, if I wanted to fill my car with books and rescue them I was welcome to do so.
My local library does not have university library volume. When they built a new library for the town (third one in my lifetime!) they made sure to put a room for the Friends of the Library Chronic Used Book Sale. They still pulped so many copies of twilight
libraries and people throw away books all the time. anytime i move away i typically toss about 100 books.
it’s normal. it’s just paper that no longer has a use.
so weird that people think like there is some obscure sacred knowledge here and this is sacrilegious.
It’s not necessary about books being sacred. It’s about throwing out things that can serve more people for much longer. This paper still absolutely has a use, contrary to what you say.
Don’t you have a store for second-hand books around? Or a library that would accept book donations? People will gladly make use of your old book stock. They won’t have to overpay, you will help the environment if nothing else, and some book nerd will finally find the specific edition of a specific book you have.
Ok, but these are acedamic text books. The kinds of books which could teach people new things. With all these books, since they’re just getting trashed anyway, you could pretty much set up an academy for poor people who wouldn’t normally be able to afford academia.
I get the love of physical books and understand it. But I’d rather poor people get the very latest electronically by pirating it via Annas Archive or the like rather than get a substandard education by reading out of date textbooks. In fact, when I was in college, I pirated textbooks I had paper copies of simply because I was tired of lugging around all that weight.
kinds of books which could teach people new things.
Or old things now out of date or wrong.
You are not going to accomplish that using a random selection of textbooks. It doesn’t even look like there are that many textbooks in these piles. Realistically, you’d probably have better luck asking students taking intro-level courses to donate their old text books, or just pirating the textbooks you need
Noone wants it, and theres noone who wants to take them and set up an academy for poor people.
poor people don’t read books, let alone textbooks
Don’t worry too much about what poor people do or don’t do.
that’s not how any of that works. it’s cute you think so though.
anyone can read a bunch of books. you can go buy these books on amazon.
getting a degree is a totally different thing. to grant degrees you must be an accredited educational institution.
Getting a degree and learning something are two different things.
nobody is learning physics for fun dude.
anyway, you’re more than welcome to go rent a truck and take these books home with you if that’s your jive.
but being angry about someone throwing out books they don’t need/want is a weird-ass flex.
nobody is learning physics for fun dude
Your school must have a great sports program.
You might not be. But you’re also failing to see how such knowledge would work in real life applications, and how the process of learning an advanced topic can generally make you more intelligent.
And beyond that, you might not get a job that absolutely requires a diploma, but it wouldn’t stop you from showing competence in jobs that somewhat align with what you’ve learned.
Are you seriously trying to argue that an employer is going to like promote you because you’re reading a physics textbook in your spare time?
I’d like to be on whatever drug you’re taking that you think this that’s how the world works. This is what is called ‘delusional optimism’.
I studied advanced mathematics for fun, it in no way improve my job prospects, performance, or make me ‘more intelligent’. It was just a personal fulfillment thing.
It’s fine if you want to learn advanced topics in your spare time, I love that myself. But I’m no under no delusion it improves anything about my life. It’s just a preference of how you like to spend your time.
anyway, by all means, please go buy 100 old text books and go to a homeless camp and try to educate folks about physics. see how that goes.
Are you seriously trying to argue that an employer is going to like promote you because you’re reading a physics textbook in your spare time?
That entirely depends on the job, now, doesn’t it?
![[OC] Academic textbooks being discarded from abandoned university buildings. More photos in post.](https://media.piefed.social/posts/3P/lr/3PlrLZZPYodyspS.jpg){kind=link}