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Comment by fhdkweig | Hacker News Reader

40 years ago, my public middle school would periodically pick books that weren't checked out for a couple decades. They'd rubberstamp "discard" over the library's ownership mark and put them in a pile that said "free books" with the implicit declaration that those books were headed for the landfill.

I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book on the neutrino and particle physics.

Libraries are always filled to the rafters. The only way to fit new books in is to take old books out. If they didn't, they would only ever have books from the 1940s when they first built that library.

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I picked up a fun university library discard the other day (month). This one is about Lunar geology. The concept of the book is so inspiring to me: "it's 1975, we brought home a lot of samples from the moon now; so what did we learn". It was fun to look through that one - a snapshot of a very exciting time.

(Taylor, Lunar Science: A post-Apollo view)

Yeah, this part of the article made me sad:

> a state university’s property, even if it’s been deemed trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals.

What a waste! Sure, allowing something like this could (and probably would) be abused, but I think the waste is worse.

I'm glad your middle school was able to do what they did!

My local town library has a book sale every fall and you can take away a paper bag of books for $10. It's not practical for every small library, in particular, to hold onto every book forever.

I wonder if they could have transferred it to a separate nonprofit, and then that nonprofit has no restrictions on whom it is transferred or sold to?

One trick state legislatures hate!

Many libraries have a Friends organization that receives books culled from the library's collections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_Libraries

The Friends are a separate nonprofit from the library, usually run by volunteers. They can also accept donations from the public, keeping books out of dumpsters. They organize regular book sales which are generally popular with the reading public. https://action.everylibrary.org/from_book_sales_to_big_impac...

If you think that books should be kept out of the landfill or the shredder, please consider starting a Friends group for your local library. https://www.ala.org/united/friends

National Friends of Libraries Week is usually the third week of October every year. https://www.ala.org/united/events_conferences/folweek

They don't have surplus sales?

I know the universe I went to did. Price it all at a penny each.

they do and it's usually an auction but at a penny each is not worth the time to even post it. Also, not many people are buying old books unless they are collectibles. So more than just books go straight into the dump.

Even libraries that go to the trouble of doing this throw away probably a thousand books for every one they can sell.

That depends on the structure and scale of the sale. Our local library sells most of the books at the biannual sales. Granted, many of those sell for very little; prices decline over several weeks so the things discarded wouldn't sell even for pennies.

In the town where I live, surplus books from the library, and donated books, are sold twice a year over several weekends. As time goes on at these events the price drops, until on the last day it's $1 for a paper grocery bag full. Those that remain go into a dumpster for pulping and recycling.

It's quite an event with long lines to get in and is loved by all. The money raised is used to buy more books for the library.

https://booksale.org/

That is what deep basement storage is for.

A last copy policy will ensure that when one wants to compare a first edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ against a second, one can get the full weight of Aragorn's snark:

>What did you fear that I should say? That I have here a rascal of a rebel dwarf that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?'

Schools in poor towns don't have multiple levels or basements or even extra storage rooms. What you see is all you get.

If there is enough space to have a room full of books, it would be better used as a publicly accessible set of stacks. The only real reason to have a librarian-only room is for books that are rare and valuable.

As I implied elsethread, the solution for that is better funding.

Someone needs to take up Carnegie's mantle and finish the job which he began.

You need a limiting principle or there is no limit to the "better funding" you're asking for until you have a Library of Congress in every small town in America, to no positive effect.

What's the limiting principle you propose? It has to be something real libraries and library funding sources can take action on, because they have to take real-world actions on them. So this is not a time for aspirational speeches or vague exhortations to "do more", which is the exact opposite of a limiting principle anyhow. What is "enough"?

The limiting principle should be that for a given ILL region/system, there is at least one copy of each book/edition which entered that system which can be loaned out.

As I noted, it's a pain for me to have to drive down to DC to get access to a book which _used_ to be in the local library system, but isn't anymore, or to purchase my own copy (which wasn't previously necessary).

> to no positive effect.

This is a REALLY bold assumption you’re making here, and frankly until we’ve tried it I don’t think you can argue that it has no positive effect to put tons of books in every small town everywhere.

Most books are not worth saving.

I used to work in a bookstore, and I've been working in libraries almost my entire career. Most books have no value. I've probably thrown out a million books in my life; most of them have been diet books, cook books, and political biographies.

My current library is around 2000 square feet and I acquire around 1000 books a year, so I have to toss around 1000 books a year, because they're made of matter and take up space.

Goodwill is a much more accurate slice of “what is published” than any library is.

It's a bit less of a thing than it used to be, but disposable books on technology were a thing for quite a while too. Think titles like "iPhone 6 for Dummies", "Learn Flash in 24 Hours", or "Windows 8 for Seniors" - there are a lot of books which were written (usually on the cheap) for a specific audience at a specific time, and which have no enduring value.

Also along these lines: test prep and study guide books. Same deal really.

Someone can ask for a copy in the mail, cheaper than pre-emptively printing and storing thousands of copies of every version of every book.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ref_=search_f...

Sure, there are always solutions, and many of them usually involve more money. But that money usually doesn't just magically appear, even with plenty of Carnegie-types these days looking to whitewash their reputations through philanthropy. The money often is the problem that needs to be solved, and there's just no source for those funds.

What's stopping you?

Society is completely overloaded with a vast surplus of commercial property. Something can be done

That is what big national central libraries are for. Hopefully government funded libraries actually properly archiving everything printed in the country.

This is a brilliant observation, in regards to the first edition's depiction of Gollum.

In the first edition, he was depicted as a large creature, and Tolkien was upset about it, and in the second edition, changed the description to small.

This information was gathered by a rare book seller who's videos I find immensely interesting.

> That is what deep basement storage is for.

That's what scanned books are for. Didn't google already scan them all? And then the book publishers shut that down?

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