The mild anarchy of piles of second-hand books

I managed to build a decent sci-fi collection almost purely from charity shops. It was fascinating to me to map out the relative fortunes of charities just by their second hand book prices. Cancer charities always seemed quite flush, the shops well kept, the books priced in whole pounds. Charities for elderly people usually had the best prices (and for me the best selection), perhaps because much of the stock was bequeathed in bulk. I'd be sure to overpay for my bag of 20 novels for less than a fiver, it always felt like a steal.

My favourite finds are old chess books, especially old books about chess programming. One of my favourite ways to learn a subject is following its history, from primitive approaches through successively more complex and effective ideas.

It's always been infinitely comforting to me that even these cheap, dilapidated stacks of paper each contained whole worlds, days of entertainment for pennies. I got the same feeling about computers from a young age, the fractal quality of always being able to dive deeper, never hitting walls. In some ways I feel sad that these days I get caught up on authors not publishing the next book in a series (some for many years) or having to wait for the next series of something I've just binged on Netflix, or even being forced to wait for the next episode of something. Second hand bookshops remind me of a different (and perhaps more sustainable) pace of life.

It’s hard to find anything that’s not books 2 through the penultimate book of a airport novel trade paperback at my local second-hand book store. There is a bit of a “no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” feeling.

Because of how easy it is to look up the going rate for a used book online these days, a lot of books go straight to eBay/Amazon and don’t even make it to the store. Those that make it to the store are set aside to be sold online and don’t make it to the shelves. Those that make it to the shelves are almost immediately bought if there is any interest in them at all before you even make it to the store. The end result is that the books on the shelves are the books no one wants and you probably won’t either.

The same thing has been happening with used video games where the only games on the shelves are old versions of yearly licensed sports games.

Incidentally, as someone who tends to move around a lot, this has also been a burden. Once I've bought a second-hand book and spent hours reading it, I find it very difficult to abandon it (especially if I enjoyed it). So whenever I move from a city, I inevitably spend a small fortune on funnelling them back to my Ma's house.

When I finally buy a place I plan to gather them all and have my own little library of used books, from all round the world.

The new owners tried to make it into a Christian thing but didn't understand the nuances of the used book industry the way she did, and so it folded after some time.

Meanwhile, I have thousands of used books and I have no idea what to do with them. Old programming books -- what to do with those? Are they worth anything to anyone now? Fiction I can understand, but these seemed to have aged out. I think I have books on Java old enough to drive.

This is why I love the libraries and old book shops. There's a lot of value in the serendipity of browsing, since you can discover related monographs that one's search queries somehow missed. Also it's great for inspiration: you see unconnected things which might spark new ideas or interests.

> It feels increasingly difficult to access forms of historical material which haven’t been diligently curated for your good, filtered into bland homogeneity to suit some corporation’s agenda.

It's good to escape that algorithmic curation of one's interests.

With digital copies I'll screenshot a page.

Not sure what is better, both seem to have their problems. Underlining requires flipping through every page. Screenshotting gives you more and less information than you need.

But library digital books are free and don't require transportation to obtain.

As a side note, read science, history and philosophy books. It's mind boggling how much better these books are than social media. If a book sucks, move onto the next one(or tell yourself you will read it later).

The works you can't find? Those are the ones people treasure.

Or, at least, the ones people won't part with for some reason.

Someone had put shelves in the telephone box and it has a small plastic curtain to protect the books from the rain

It's still there since I first saw it over 18months ago, so I'm assuming the kids have not found a creative way of using the books for other purposes or may be they use it

One particularly weird benefit is searching for your fave author and finding some PhD or other obscure fan produced work about the author (and/or their works) that would never make it into an actual bookshop, even a digital one.

They have some digital experiments to recreate the browsing a library feeling too (similar to the rash of Mac book cataloging apps that appeared on the Mac way back and may have kicked off the most recent revival of the skeumorphic design trend.)

Also, a lot of the older books on technical terms are far better because the skills on similar education levels were far higher back in the day. For example, today's Electrical Engineering books from the first year in College were on par on senior HS years.

I can see from at least one comment that there is some disagreement, but I've been frustrated for years that as the internet has evolved into its modern form, the 'heap-like' structure of Usenet/gopher directory/irc server LIST command has been mostly lost/deprecated.

Or you can just search a few random words on Google/Amazon/whatever, then pick a random title.

The article's other point seems to be that modern literature is too curated and bland. I don't know if the author's joking or if they're just not very well-read.