Weeding the Worst Library Books
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
A lot of people don't realize the detailed process that goes into deciding to weed a book. When was it last checked out? How does it compare to other materials in the collection? How many copies of this book are available regionally, nationally? What's the monetary value of the book? Is the subject matter outdated, and if so, does it still have value? It's a very complicated process and unfortunately libraries simply aren't able to keep every book, nor should they!
As a compromise I've seen some libraries offer weeded books for very cheap or even give them away for free, which seems like a good way to please both sides.
Their justification was that TAOCP had never been checked out. Which is funny because the year prior when I tried to check out a volume, they told me it was a reference book and could not be checked out.
I'm still completely confused about how that decisions was actually made, and why the books weren't given away or sold.
TACOP is extremely dense and put me to sleep every time I tried to read it. I recently donated my copy of 0-4 to my work library, where nobody was interested in reading it.
The fact that we both have opposite views of your example books shows that this is a difficult process for librarians.
That said, I never worked through the remaining chapters of the series, and likely never will. It's a reference book. Read the sections as they pertain to you. For instance, TAOCP was my introduction to sorting networks. This led to direct, measurable, improvements in a few embedded programs (where consistent, deterministic behavior, and optimal behavior, were strongly desired).
I mean, few people ever read a dictionary. I still have one on my desk at home and at the office. This isn't substantially different (though I do recommend skimming it so you are aware of what resources it contains for later reference).
Ideally one or two shallow-SMEs in each field would be maintained over a region, but that will never happen.
So you end-up with librarians making retention decisions based on what publications tell them are the "most useful" books in a topic area and trying to correlate that with check-out frequency. But those topic areas are coarse-grained like 'history of aviation' or 'web programming'. It's a crap-shoot and unfortunately a lot of good books are weeded instead of the dross.
My cheap solution: non-fiction is retained until a updated edition is purchased ( or forever if that doesn't occur ), non-curriculum fiction is weeded after 50 loans regardless of replacement. Curriculum fiction such as Shakespeare probably shouldn't be weeded, just replaced.
One of my mates was a DJ. He had the rule of 100. He only owned 100 records. Whenever he bought a new one, he had to purge another, to stay at 100. Some tough choices were made.
My local library auctions their books. The books I donate get added to the pile. Extras are probably bought in bulk by Powell's or thriftbooks.com
Another option might be to try putting them on the "library book sale" shelf for ultra cheap... if that's legal.
This also happens with used bookstores, but in that case the upshot is, instead, that used bookstores won't buy technical books, so they never make it onto their shelves.
Nowadays I almost entirely get my technical information online, in part because of having moved to Argentina, where there weren't very many technical books in the first place — our famous national abundance of bookstores are dedicated almost entirely to fiction and opinion, rather than knowledge in the sense of falsifiable propositions.
(that said not throwing away my copy of K&R 1st ed)
I had the bright idea a few years back to give this a try. I went to a couple of library sales, scanning books and eyeballing others. I came away with a few books that I could have made a 5-10 dollar profit on. But I came away with something more valuable than that.
I looked at the other people at the sale doing the same thing I was, because there were several of them. Call me prejudiced, but here was my take. They seemed like older, retired guys who were probably earning a pension or collecting social security, and basically out and about doing this "job" just so that they could have an ostensible reason to escape the "Eye of Sauron" (read: wife).
None of them looked like they were making a living. They looked like they just wanted out of the house.
Better World Books averages 1 container of incoming books per day.
I've only dealy with them as a customer, they're not good at packaging books for posting but if most of their stock is old penny-books then presumably they're trying to make margin on the Amazon postal charge.
I've bought several non-penny-books from them, never had a problem with packaging, either.
(FWIW Archive.org + Lulu.com is a great way to get an out-of-print book into your hands for relatively cheap.)
So the way I see it, libraries are good for reading what people popularly read. They're good for introducing our children to Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, or Lord of the Rings, or Dr. Seuss, or Amelia Bedelia.
The ultimate solution might be delivering a palette to Amazon and letting them manage & ship them for you (as Amazon does with some used sellers), but I can see why Amazon might not want to shoulder that burden.
I worked in a library for ten years. I'd say, by a huge margin, most people come into the library looking for fiction books, and DVDs. And picture books, lots of picture books.
> The Alexandrine grammarians undertook the critical revision of the works of classical Greek literature,[3] particularly those of Homer, and their studies were profoundly influential,[4] marking the beginning of the Western grammatical tradition.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrine_grammarians
(Not arguing with your point about usefulness in general; just twitching when it came to the Iliad.)
I've often found myself wanting to read a reference book prior to purchase (technical books are extremely expensive to buy).
Do any of the universities offer subscriptions to members of the public?
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/using/getting-a-readers-card/ch...
Having said that, the books I was reading there were mostly general programming books. I don't know if they have more specific technical books.
The British Library also has some scary note on their website about how you need to demonstrate why you need access. But that's not worth worrying about. I just went there and signed up, nobody asked me to justify why I want to read books there.
[1] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/membership/researchers-public [2] https://www.city.ac.uk/library/my-library/external
In my local libraries, two I have been going to since I was child, there has always been huge book sections on gardening, and cooking. Just racks, and racks? I know these are popular subjects, but it just seemed like overkill.
While books on the hard sciences are lacking? I know a book on higher mathematics isn't going to be checked out often, but these libraries should buy these books for that one inquisitive person. That kid who's just interested, and might never get the chance to go to college?
I also noticed a lack of technical/trade manuals.
I don't care like I used to because I don't use the library like I used to. At one time, it was really the only way to learn how to do something.
But then again, what do I know. If I was in charge of buying, it would be floor to ceiling with just reference books.
Municipal libraries are circulating libraries, so if they spend $80 on TAOCP vol. 1 and it's borrowed once, they basically wasted $80. They should have spent the $80 on something else that people would borrow multiple times, and the person who wanted TAOCP could have gotten it via inter-library loan (probably from some university library).
And I think online databases and Wikipedia are busily killing off physical reference books.