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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.
Omg I want to pillage it. I used the library for most of my textbooks and regret not also buying a cheap outdated copy. It's not like the principles of electricity or statics/dynamics were changing anytime in my lifetime
My wife and I go antiquing, usually something to do on the weekend that gets us out of the house and exploring. Old History, scientific and reference books are the best. A lot of the stuff in them is outdated, but they're still a snapshot of the world from a different time.
I do the same, any old engineering or science stuff is coming home with me.
Our understanding of a lot of things becomes outdated pretty quickly. Like sociology, medicine, psychology, even ideas about literature and philosophy change.
Oh absolutely, hell history changes over time, especially distant history, but even stuff like the 18th century western Europe. But also I'm an engineer and want reference texts for when I have to do something for the first time since college or need to throw some random bullshit together and just need to double check something for it
Someone should rescue all those books and ~~donate them to a good cause~~ destructively scan them to feed AI models
Can I toss a book of lewd poetry about chili in there first?
That's honestly a good use case for out of date textbook which knowledge is not useful anymore.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?
Would be better than letting them get rained on and thrown away
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.
It really depends on the subject; mathematics for instance probably isn't going to change much decade to decade, but psychology is changing constantly.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It really depends on the text. An intro thermodynamics textbook is going to still be fine. And some of my college courses were niche enough that we were using textbooks that were over a decade old. Though nearly 30 is pushing it
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 (c) yes, if I wanted to fill my car with books and rescue them I was welcome to do so.
... I would so come with a truck and load up from that "dumpster dive". That is a lot of potentially golden knowledge - with an increasing AI and digital focus, suddenly such things are worth parsing through and preserving in some 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. I 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.
