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Comment by ak39 | Hacker News Reader

I've always considered books just too precious to be binned or thrown away. My dad was a teacher so books were all we had, devouring whatever came our way. Sometimes rereading the same works again. We moved a lot so finding a library in the new town would be akin to finding Aladdin's cave for us. It's now a mild OCD condition in me when others don't look after my books (dog ears or folded pages. Gets my f'cking goat!). I silently judge others for not looking after their own books (jealously petting my own book with endearment). I've still kept my obsolete tech books - safe asylum.

How do people find the nerve to throw a book away? How?!

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Interestingly this came up again just the other day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002419

Librarians have to weed their collections regularly, or see them overrun with bad books. Due to changes in interest or deteriorating condition, some books need to be purged so that the important ones can be maintained and new ones can be brought in.

This was a liberating idea for me, as I'm a bibliophile from a family of bibliophiles. Your collection is only as good as your curation.

Exactly. A museum doesn’t hang some random kid’s art next to a Picasso. They don’t even have room to hang all the Picassos and some of them aren’t actually all that good. Holding onto every book you’ve ever gotten your hands on is just hoarding.

I can't believe that discussion (now un-commentable) didn't include a link to http://awfullibrarybooks.net/. Good stuff.

Wow, I'm really glad this site exists! It's been a while since I fell down an internet rabbithole like it.

The internet has had some interesting repercussions for the idea that all knowledge is worth saving. We're producing data many orders of magnitude than ever before, and it's easier to save it than ever before, and 99% of it is completely useless and uninteresting outside of its original context, even for hypothetical future historians.

As you say, the goal shouldn't be to save everything just in case, but to weed out the irretrievably useless and carefully index the rest.

Keeping books for the sake of keeping books is just hoarding. And hoarding is a form of fear. Finding the nerve to throw away a book just means finding and facing the fear that drives you to hoarding.

Having cleaned up after deceased book hoarders... it's a cruel thing to do. Case after case of books, of no real interest or value, that will never get read, still sitting there rotting because OMG IT'S A BOOK YOU CAN'T THROW BOOKS AWAY.

Keep the books that are great. The books you'll read again, or use for reference in the future, or that have true sentimental value (beyond omg it's a book). I often give books away when I'm done with them - if I loved it, I probably know someone else who will love it too.

But that copy of Learn Lotus 1-2-3 in 24 Hours? Trash it. That third-run paperback of a Stephen King novel? Trash it.

I would agree about some books. But anything relating to technology should be kept. Already it is difficult to get copies of, for example, the Smalltalk-80 books. Technology reference books, and books that teach technology to people are books that should be kept, because they serve as some of the few documents that show that these things _did indeed exist_. Who, in a couple of generations, will be left to remember the BBSes, the features of Word Perfect, etc. Without this history we will be left to reinvent the wheel constantly.

I don't agree there. Classics should be kept - stuff like the Dragon book (compiler theory), Refactoring, Knuth's Art of Computer Programming series, etc. But frankly, most books about our industry are trash - throwaway material that will be as obsolete as buggy whips, in a lot less time. But the good books never become obsolete.

I recently picked up a copy of The Mythical Man-Month, from 1975. There's hardly a line in it that doesn't still apply today.

There was an interesting time in the mid-90's when computers and internet were gaining some steam, in which used book stores would pay top dollar for any computer related book, no matter how niche or obsolete. They've wised up considerably since then, though.

Let museums figure out that stuff. If none want what you have, it's not valuable and will be thrown out when you die anyway.

I'm sorry I threw away my DecSystem-10 "Orange Book".

Throw them after scanning and uploading to Drive/Dropbox.

Why even that? Why should I spend an evening scanning 400 pages of junk? That's worse than just keeping the book. Trash is trash.

I could spend that time finishing Accelerate (potentially a timeless classic), or Openshift in Action (doomed to be dated and irrelevant someday, but immediately useful to me now). Those are genuinely useful to me. Hoarding is not.

I've been culling my book collection every time I move. During my last move in March I discarded a lot of books with sentimental value that were really just taking up space. Examples: my college textbooks on projective geometry and abstract algebra. I always loved how the more interesting the math, the thinner and more dense the textbook is. A pile of computer-related books. It's telling what I kept from that shelf: K&R's The C Programming Language. Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment (I bought the former in 1993 and the latter in 1995, and they're both still useful from time-to-time.).

What I have left are books I haven't read, but plan to, and books with extreme sentimental value.

Quite often when someone dies without interested relatives, a cursory sweep of the house is done for obvious valuables and then everything else is thrown away. Appears to be what's happened here. Kind of compounds the tragedy, but in a world of plentiful stuff and expensive real estate it's hard to avoid.

Estate auctions kinda fill this gap, if there's enough "stuff". It's not uncommon to see boxes or even pallets of loosely-related possessions sell as a lot, where even they buyer probably doesn't know what all they're getting.

I've acquired a fairly large stash of firearms parts this way. There are a few valuable individual items, but in aggregate it's probably worth at least $15-20k. I probably have $250 invested in all of it, and it all fits in a single (heavy) moving box.

I've also gotten quite a few valuable fountain pens and parts for them the same way. Once I bought a ratty old desk for $50 because the drawers were full of office supplies that I wanted, including a couple of vintage Waterman pens. I dumped them into a box and gave the desk to the other person that was bidding on it so I didn't have to haul it home. She was ecstatic to get the desk for free, and I was happy to get ~$1k worth of vintage pens for almost nothing.

Even with an interested relative, sometimes there's just too much stuff. My father-in-law left a basement full of computer stuff. There was some Heathkit hardware, TRS-80s, a couple of AT&T 3B2's, tons of PCs, a Bell Labs MAC Tutor, old calculators, thousands of CDs and floppies, piles and piles of printouts of old code, plus books. Some of it was probably valuable to someone, somewhere, but it was a full room, chest deep with stuff, and just hauling it all out took several days. Nearly all of the hardware went to an electronics recycler.

You can't generalise about books. Old textbooks at a low academic level, or especially old guides to computer software, don't have a lot of intellectual value. Of course we don't want to completely lose the knowledge of what those genres of book were like (from a given period, say the 80s) but they have little practical value. They can no longer serve their original purpose, which was dissemination of useful ideas.

every once in a while you find that a book you bought for <$10 is selling for several multiples of that

https://www.amazon.com/Coaching-Run-Shoot-Football-Black/dp/...

I have a copy of that on my shelf at home, somewhat perversely, learning that it had actual resale value made me want to sell it less

If you havn't read a book in a few years, it's probably just taking up space. I'd rather have an uncluttered home. My wife I probably throw out and buy 50 books a year. It supporters publishers and the physical waste is inconsequential (since wood paper is not a scarce resource).

I hope you donate them instead of just throwing them in the bin

The question is donate them to where. Thrift stores generally don't want them and 90% of library donations just wind up in the sell pile too before being tossed.

Better that than tossing them. The library could, almost certainly, use the money.

I also Craigslist a lot of books when I'm done with them, or did before I moved more towards buying e-books.

>The library could, almost certainly, use the money

Ehhhh. Those books probably cost more to store than they make in profit. Books take up a lot of space and are likely selling for $1 (hardcover) or 10 for $1 (paperback) at the use book sale. Used books are really hard to sell, and there are a lot of them lying around.

My wife had a collection of hundreds of paperbacks that the public library refused to take and Goodwill suggested we throw away, so we sent them to the recycling center.

Goodwill will take and re-sell books. Just don't give them textbooks.

> Just don't give them textbooks.

Is this true for libraries too? I was really bummed awhile back when I gave my local library some very good CS canon type textbooks and never saw them go on the shelves alongside the current crop of "Python for Dummies" type stuff. Is there any way to help them separate the wheat from the chaff when you donate?

Really I'd trust your local librarians to know what would actually be useful to your local community.

Alternatively it could have been sent to another library in the county system.

Yeah, that was my assumption as well. But upon reflection, I fear they don't have the expertise to tell the difference between quickly-obsolete texts and those that are more timeless. It can be bewildering even with expertise in the field, so I don't begrudge them the difficulty. But maybe you're correct that they have a better knowledge of what is useful to the local community, and perhaps decided these were too academic and sent them to a university library instead. But personally, I think it's a bummer that a curious kid won't see SICP on the computing shelf, rather than five or six books on ColdFusion and the like.

In my experience it's not usually too hard to find a second-hand bookstore that will take donations. That's what we do during our annual Culling of the Books.

I know for a fact that my local bookstore ends up pulping and recycling most donated books.

My mother started and ran a book donation charity. A lot of what we received as donations just ended up going to recycling --outdated encyclopedias, romance novels, and so on. The work needed to sort out people's low quality donations actually ended up dominating the costs of running it, moreso than manning a "free books" table at a local grocery store. She tried just letting people sort through stuff themselves at first, but most people would decide after a short time searching through the free books that they were all crap and give up, defeating the purpose.

The top 33% we donate to thrift sales. Rest aren't worth the time and effort.

>How do people find the nerve to throw a book away? How?!

What else do you do? I have finite space. For the most part, I donate them to my local library for their annual book sale but I imagine most of them end up in a dumpster somewhere.

As for writing in them or marking pages, some are pieces of art in their physical form, but most are just a tool for communication. I make notes and otherwise mark up books that I'm using as a source of information. They're just a tool.

Even for the books that are pieces of art in their physical form, writing on them is merely transformative art.

I see it as enhancement, added value - and I say it as someone who can't write in books after a decade of it being drilled into my head during childhood!

For what it's worth, the statement of Fermat's Last Theorem was written in a margin of a book.

I was bicycling to work today and passed by a cardboard box on the trail that had some books in it. I circled back around to get a closer look and found...a couple of dog-eared paperbacks with a Danielle Steel novel on top and a VHS tape titled something like "Christian Ministry Programs". It's still there if you want to secure them for posterity.

> It's now a mild OCD condition in me when others don't look after my books

I really like the process as a good book goes from new to well worn. A pristine book is an unread book, which generally means it was naff..

Some people use "patina" to describe the acquired appearance of items which have aged gracefully.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patina

Had to look this slang up: naff - lacking taste or style

It just means not great

That isn't an example of OCD. Perhaps OCPD but generally just seeking order.

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