We’re Drowning in Old Books. But Getting Rid of Them Is Heartbreaking

PSA: The Internet Archive will work with you to pack, ship, and archive collections of books, audio records, periodicals, and other media. You can reach out to them at donations@archive.org to discuss the transfer of physical items or entire collections.

If you are interested in volunteering for collection sorting and packing ops, signup for Jason Scott’s ArchiveCorps mailing list. Low volume, a couple times per year.

Finally, if you work at, are associated with, or know of a library of any sort that intends to close for whatever reason, please point them to the Internet Archive. They’ll work with them to ingest their entire corpus.

http://archivecorps.com/

https://archive.org/details/marygrove

https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

https://help.archive.org/help/media-types-for-donations/

https://help.archive.org/help/does-the-internet-archive-have...

(not associated with the Internet Archive in any way)

If someone is sure they want to get rid of their paper books, if they can find a library that will stock them, that might minimize regrets.

After grad school, it was looking like I'd have a lean move (ended up only owning two suitcases, a few boxes, and a futon), but I was a books person. At work, my office had neat shelves of technical books, and at home, my living room had neat shelves of fiction and other non-work topics.

Since I felt I couldn't haul my books on this next move, I ended up selling some of my more rare technical books, and the rest of my books I donated to a branch of the local public library.

I later heard that libraries often don't have much use for donations, and often sell them.

A few years later, I was in the mood to read some science fiction, but no longer owned a collection, and wasn't about to start building a new one. So I went to the public library branch. I find they have a collection of well-worn books, and... it's pretty much my old collection, which was like-new when donated (I read without cracking the spine, etc.). Which meant that a lot of people got some use out of the books, and maybe it was positive formative for some kids.

I decided that was a good use. And every time I wish I had some technical book I sold, I remember the donated SF books that got read, and I don't feel bad.

I only recently resumed buying books (as ebooks): https://www.neilvandyke.org/ebooks/ Ebooks aren't going to be a conversation-starter in my office or living room, but I can read them, and they don't further complicate the crazy rental housing situation here. Ebooks also won't be a burden to my heirs (hopefully many decades away) to dispose of, though an unresolved question is how to let heirs inherit ebooks that they want to.

One of my first jobs was throwing out literally tons of bound periodicals at a college library. They were already in JSTOR and other databases, and other libraries had many copies. The whole campus had 6 months to grab whatever they wanted from the list. Other libraries and institutions had years. Nevertheless i filled a cargo container sized dumpster with the unwanted volumes and felt weird doing it. Some passerby clearly disapproved and i told them they were welcome to whatever they wanted, but in the end no one actually wanted a hundred pound set of obscure medical journals from the 1980s in their own home. I saved some of the older and more beautiful items, some from the late 1800s, but even those couldn't be given away in necessary volume and what i grabbed was just a drop in the bucket. They remain in my parent's basement. Perhaps now there is a more efficient way to crowd source saving such items.

Bread is very cheap. Despite that, in my country (Poland), many people believe that throwing bread away is wrong. When it gets stale or moldy, they will either eat it anyway, feed animals with it, leave it next to a trashcan so someone else can take it (which never happens, no one wants moldy bread) or burn it. I want to stress that it's just about bread, they don't care about wasting the other kinds of food.

This is not unlike how some treat books. They can't accept that the overwhelming majority of old books are worthless (at least monetarily) and easily replaceable.

From my days at the secondhand store I remember that half the books that came in were recycled. There is a lot of pulp. Many books are quite damaged. Also, schoolbooks from 20 or 30 years old are not very much in demand.

At the same time, I enjoy buying books secondhand. Preferably at a shop, but an internet marketplace is fine too if I am looking for something specific.

For me, books are fungible. I only keep them if I am not planning on reading them again and not looking anything up. I guess a lot of people treat books this way, which is all the more joy for secondhand buyers.

Technical books need to be preserved. Most inventions are based on old ideas or discovering hidden structures that can be used in another domain. If we have not preserved Darwin's books, we may not have advanced in genetics now. The pity is there is a misconception that "you can find every thing in internet"- it is not true. Most African countries lack technical books. So, please don't through those books rather find a philanthropist who can build a library of technical books.Most teachers will find that not one text book is not enough to teach a subject and can find examples from other books. Is there a national institution to preserve technical books.

A few years ago, I helped a friend move an entire book collection that he'd bought from the seller's house to his house, and while waiting I flicked open one of the books, when I noticed a little insect crawling around. That's when I learnt about booklice. I can never look at old books the same way again, knowing that there might be bugs living in them.

Think it was Kevin Kelly who said books will never be less expensive than they are now and he's probably correct. We have a glut of them now but once that glut is cleared out, the cost to acquire particular books likely will go up. This doesn't mean that hoarding or speculative investing in books is a good idea but if there are books that have special appeal to you in their physical form, now is a good time to get them.

I worked in libraries for 20 years before retiring. Getting libraries - and often the librarians - to get rid of old, worn, unread books and books with obsolete information in them is very difficult. Near the end of my time as a cataloger, we did a 'big weed' and got rid of tons of books - thanks to the gods for that! And that was only the first step. There is still plenty more to weed out.

Libraries can serve the twenty-first century public best by giving the people who don't have access to the internet the means to do so rather than cluttering the world with a plethora of unsustainable physical books. Let libraries maintain a minimal physical collection, and provide the general population with staff to support them in obtaining the information they need. Librarians can guide patrons to obtain access to the literary and audiovisual materials they seek online rather than purchasing and maintaining a physical collection that utilizes equipment that is becoming obsolete. Most librarians have degrees in (Library and...) Information Science. In this century, the emphasis is on Information Science.

My mother has an impressive library at home and I wonder what I will do with it someday. Ideally I would have a library take it as it, including the fantastic and less fantastic books (some are rarities, some are worthless).

We were trying to talk her into that already with my brother, but first she looked at is as if we started to run naked in the street, and then kindly asked us to mind our business :)

We managed, after years of effort, to talk her into using a digital reader (I do not remember how we managed to do that). She was always against, and then tried for a week, which turned into two and it is now two years she is using this almost exclusively.

Which is good because she is reading one or two books per week and loves to build the queue of what is left. Least time I checked, it was 100 books.

My father once decided to put some order in her library, starting with a small set of shelves. He sorted the books by size (or alphabetically, I do not remember). It was at a time my mouth was at the hospital, we drove her back home and discovered with her the cleanup, and a proud husband.

We sat comfortably with my brother with some imaginary popcorn to watch the scene what my father was fleeced alive after my mother realized that all her mess (that she knew by heart) was gone.

So yes, books are difficult to get rid of for some people.

The economics of books were always weird. $15 for a new paperback that you can barely even give away when you’re done reading it, so it costs more than the book is even worth to most people to send it in the mail.

It makes it hard to get old books to the people who want them.

Hah! Can't/won't read because paywall, but I can tell you what it feels like to utterly massacre about 250 linear feet of the residue of 42 years of a thoroughly enjoyed and carefully curated book collection.

We moved across the country and purposely downsized in anticipation of a quite light retirement a few years from now.

The first couple of book boxes to the Goodwill were a quite pleasant experience. Finally, we are in the process of losing significant accrued but debilitating mass!

The last half-dozen were an absolutely gut wrenching emotional desolation. A high proportion of our self-value in life were embedded in those pages, it turns out.

Now however we're over it. As far as we can tell, in our social orbit essentially no-one reads in a methodical way. We were pretty focused on personal enjoyment, which we have always found in the more difficult authors. So, for instance, when three years ago I picked up the 38 yo copy of Ulysses that I bailed on so many years ago, I decided that older me thinks that's the best book I have ever read. My social group though. They apparently considered such an effort (yeah it sure was) to be stupid waste of time ("I would never do that."). Oh well[1].

I kept that one, yep. And my technical collection is down to a nostalgic retention of the two volumes of Hairer et al's "Solving Ordinary Differential Equations". And Knuth. It was very hard to part with Stevens, but I did. We also kept 15 feet of cooking/culinary references. Even with those, my McGee's "On Food..." only lives in my calibre library, but I dislike how awkward it is to look things up.

So, on balance, it was the right thing to do, but it ended up being very, very hard.

[1] I'm not a snob! I have happily read galaxies worth of schlock. If Cosma Shalizi can fess up to it then I will too. But I can barely remember any of them. Joyce, I remember a lot of his stuff, not just Ulysses.

There is a social club locally that has done a used book sale for years and years, with the proceeds going to scholarships for local women. It's a major event - takes up one of the largest meeting spaces in town and is so crowded they practically have to control access into the building. Raises a lot of money. I know we are just a small town (approx 35,000) but if we are any example, the rumors of book's death has been greatly exaggerated.

This fall, we lost about sixty books to a plumbing failure. This led to reflections along the lines of, Well, I definitely enjoy Peterer Schneider's The German Comedy, but will I really want to read it again? My estimate is that twenty or so I don't really want back. I suspect that the same ratio holds for the house generally; but a lot of the books are my wife's, and her and my criteria will be different.

I love giving books away. There are so many options. Charities, neighborhood social networks, a box with a "free" sign, book crossing, public book shelves. I've used all of those. There are still some at my parents that I need to give away, but it feels great making sure that someone else gets more use out of them.

I wish I could get a free ebook of all my physical books.