I have been told that acid based papers can't be recycled, I'd take them to the charity shop but it seems pointless if they'll just throw them out.
Designate one bookshelf as your "memory shelf". Keep the books on the languages you learned the most from or that remind you of your best (or most horrible) projects, and place them on that shelf.
Display it prominently, and it will be become a conversation starter for every nerd that comes to your home. "OMG, I haven't thought about Dreamweaver in years!". You can then share war stories.
It will only get more fun as the years pass.
Whenever I visit peoples homes, I look at their bookshelves. I pick one book that may indicate something in common, and I make a comment or ask a question. It rarely fails to start a great conversation. And when you're fixing their computer and waiting half an hour for a malware scan to finish, and the customer insists on sitting there watching, such conversations are life savers. Plus, you learn a ton.
If you keep them as a conversation starter, try this alternative method.
https://youtu.be/UqLTU9uFlPA?list=PLsgvviE9c9fBEPvopDnHcYhyN...
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For archival purposes you can go see if it's in the Library of Congress or scanned into Internet Archive, and if not, that's a project you can opt to take on(but it's pretty high effort). Quickly checking for resale value as other comments suggest is also not hard, just expect that most of your stash will go straight to the bin, and getting more out of it means making it your job.
These may not "last a lifetime" in some sense. But early computing books, especially by well-known authors, may come close.
Algorithms, unix networking, assembly books, the art of computer programming, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, anything by Benjamin Pierce, good compiler books, discrete mathematics, the art of electronics, Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Spivak's Calculus, ...
A few months ago, I picked up my significantly dog-eared copy of TUPE and leafed through it to a section I'd remembered being about 'hoc', the higher-order calculator language they derive from first principles. I'm currently writing a 6502 compiler and I was implementing the assembler stage. I wanted my assembler to have macros and be able to calculate expressions etc., because I'm planning on having an asm [...] block in the high-level code. Being able to call the macro "_xfer32 r1,r2" is a lot more appealing than a long series of lda/sta...
So I sat and read about hoc, and worked my way through it, eventually coming up with something I could put into my code and call for any expression calculation. The compiler is a full-blown AST-based model but assemblers are much simpler beasts, and accepting of more limitations. Hoc (or rather an adaption of it) was an ideal basis for what I wanted.
Some old books have timeless wisdom within.
In NYC, we can put out paperback books with our paper/cardboard recycling.
My father had shelves of computer science books from the 50s and 60s - the first half of the books would always be dedicated to how to decipher a particular professor’s writing and flow charting style, and then it would get into the actual computer science. Nobody writes books like that anymore. He also had a complete set of IBM System/360 manuals at one point. Then he threw everything away and it just killed me. He had boxes of both used and unused IBM punch cards that suffered the same fate. I would have hsuled it all off just for nostalgia value if I had known.
Don’t waste charity shop time, if you have technical books that are of no historical interest and are long irrelevant with expired technologies, just trash them, they served their purpose.
Ask yourself if there is a practical chance that a particular book would be able to get into the hands of someone who would actually value the information inside. If not, garbage.
I'd be astonished if those books cannot be usefully recycled alongside (say) cardboard.
But you might first ask your local museum or university computing dept if they'd like some for historical record!
C, C++, Linux, Unix, and Cisco books are eternal. They may not teach you secure ways of doing things, but they are eternal. NetWare may be obsolete. ;)
Yeah, I know it's already out there but yours are sustainable cyber art, aren't they?
I did a clean out a couple of years back of cassettes, books, CDs, and vinyl LPs and replaced them with digital copies. I also threw out the IKEA Billy bookcase they had been stored in.
The way I see it, is that I am merely transferring the informational data that I already own from one medium to another. I am not 'pirating' anything that I didn't already own before.
Those books that I couldn't replace, I kept. A lot of cassettes, vinyl LPs and CDs I made copies of myself from my own media. That took an investment of my time in order to save my space. ('Audacity' and an analog-digital converter from Amazon. Audacity also helped clean up some of the worst scratches on the LPs.)
Once I had copied off my LPs and cassettes, I could also dispose of the cassette-player and turntable.
I haven't completed my task yet. I still have some snippets of video on various VHS video-cassettes that have to be converted to digital if I can get my VHS videoplayer to work again.
I am still in the throes of converting decades-old photos that had been locked away in boxes to PNGs that display as a slide-show screen saver on the computers' screen.
1. Album art and lyrics… gone. Would have loved to share these with my son
2. Digital books can’t be skimmed. I have a physical copy of Turbo Pascal above a toilet and love to skim it while doing the business.
3. Photos. We have tens of thousands of digital photos. The gems get lost in this mess even if you star/favorite them.
If you have a few shoeboxes of physical photos, don’t get rid of them; cull them. Remove the ones that are scenery and landscape. Keep the faces and people photos. Write metadata on the back (who, where). Frame a few, keep the rest in shoeboxes to look at every 5 years.
2. Digital books can’t be skimmed.
Very true. That's probably what I miss most too.
But I see that as an offset. Many books I've had that just sat there year after year on the shelf, getting yellower and dustier by the day.
Did I mention that I'm an 'information hoarder'? I still have files on my archive disk from 40 years ago.
At some point Ebay deleted my account and I recreated it later but lost my history. Amazon now requires invasive identity verification I refuse and won't let me sell anymore, despite having over a decade doing it in good standing. It is possible it was related to me briefly selling an ebook, which doing permanently took away some of my privileges. Dunno for sure, the site is obtuse and has more archaic layers than the Windows control panel. Easy to get into a link loop and never find out why it doesn't work.
TL;DR—These big companies just DGAF. I now throw old IT books in the trash/recycle-bin when I move. Currently have some about CMS that would be useful to someone.
You'd be surprised. Go to "sell back your books" and install the app, scan in the bar code or QR, and find out. They might offer you a small amount of money.
They also take some non-technical books, btw. They send you a prepaid shipping label, too.
(Not that that's the likely reason; it's probably just an out-of-date/low-volume price point.)
I was pleasantly surprised to see “Wicked cool shell scripts” worth 4x “High Performance habits” at 48 cents
- get some resin and make micarta with them, then sell the micarta or use it in some creative projects
- use them for all your future gift wrapping, especially when giving to fellow nerds
- wallpaper a closet or two
- make a collage on plywood and hang it up as art
- make origami paper cranes
Have fun!
- Libraries didn't want them
- Collectors didn't want them
- Charities didn't want them
Ended chucking them in the bin.
the main reason I'm where I am today is the 2 programming books I got as a birthday gift at 10 yo