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Aberystwyth University closed one of its campuses a few years ago. The place has been left to rot, but recently they’ve started clearing the place out, and removing all the old scientific textbooks. Most of them look untouched. Wonder how much this lot would have set students back if buying new.
Omg I want to pillage it. I used the library for most of my textbooks and regret not also buying a cheap outdated copy. It's not like the principles of electricity or statics/dynamics were changing anytime in my lifetime
My wife and I go antiquing, usually something to do on the weekend that gets us out of the house and exploring. Old History, scientific and reference books are the best. A lot of the stuff in them is outdated, but they're still a snapshot of the world from a different time.
I do the same, any old engineering or science stuff is coming home with me.
Our understanding of a lot of things becomes outdated pretty quickly. Like sociology, medicine, psychology, even ideas about literature and philosophy change.
Oh absolutely, hell history changes over time, especially distant history, but even stuff like the 18th century western Europe. But also I'm an engineer and want reference texts for when I have to do something for the first time since college or need to throw some random bullshit together and just need to double check something for it
if anything these textbooks wont help, if they constantly make new editions adding removing, content, or updating stem/or other research.
These might just be dissertations or bound volumes of old journals. Textbooks often have some cover art whereas a lot of these don't.
There's a lot of old paper that gets very rarely consulted.
Someone should rescue all those books and ~~donate them to a good cause~~ destructively scan them to feed AI models
What university provides textbooks to students? Assuming this isn't AI generated, there is one text dated 1999 - that's way out of date for scientific texts.
Depends on the field, no? I am studying math as hobby and books from over a century ago do pretty well.
It really depends on the text. An intro thermodynamics textbook is going to still be fine. And some of my college courses were niche enough that we were using textbooks that were over a decade old. Though nearly 30 is pushing it
probably backstock from the store. Most of my professors expected every new class to re-buy the latest book for every class. The industry itself is rife with waste
It is morally correct to pirate college text books.
Aberystwyth university has a building that's been abandoned by them for about a decade
This...looks very AI to me. Maybe it's not, but it just feels so uncanny.
Back when I was in school, me and my classmates were once tasked to help clear the old books from the library. There was a big dump truck under the library windows, and we were tasked to, essentially, throw books out of the window.
You can be damn sure I took some gems with me. Books should not end like this. But also, for a younger me, it was somewhat fun.
It's good to be suspicious.
The company name on the side of the skip does check out though (they even hire skips of the exact model shown), which is a big point for them being real photos:
Most do? There are higher concentrations of textbooks in some places like the library or bookstore, which do provide textbooks to students, but there will also be a ton of them spread throughout various offices and some classrooms. It's no surprise to me that they could fill multiple dumpsters with just textbooks.
Though hopefully they don't just trash all the furniture, as there could be millions worth of desks, chairs, tables, and shelving units, depending on how big the school is.
Did your university not have a library?
Not with textbooks. We bought textbooks required for courses. As for books in libraries...a huge number of thick volumes were indexes for manual searching. Modern university libraries are meeting rooms, everything was digitized over a decade ago.
No thanks to carrying around 15 kilos of physics and chemistry texts, or trying to chase one copy of a book in the library, then finding some ambitious asshole ruined the pages. We no longer waste money on paper journals and binding volumes every year. Old journals just took up space in research buildings. Storing, moving, indexing all that paper costs money.
I've never assigned a textbook for any of my courses, they are not current enough and science can leap month to month in some fields. Students access primary papers via institution open digital subscriptions. We are saving a lot of shoulder injuries.
That's weird. My university library had a copy of every assigned textbook (multiple for large classes). You could borrow it for an hour or two at a time which was great
My college library has many class texts on the reserve shelf. This allows students who might not be able to afford a personal copy of a text to borrow the text for a few hours or days (depending on the item's lending policy).
Even when I was an undergrad, the campus library had textbooks on reserve. I mostly used this to access the questions from the current edition of the textbook, so I could use the cheaper previous edition. I promise you, Mechanical Stress Analysis doesn't change much, year to year.
In EUROPE?
Weird, I assumed that was the standard.
Ours the issue was they didn't get enough copies for the number of students, like 15 copies for a class of 40 students
... I would so come with a truck and load up from that "dumpster dive". That is a lot of potentially golden knowledge - with an increasing AI and digital focus, suddenly such things are worth parsing through and preserving in some way.
Textbooks are such a scam.. There should be a law that requires a way to do assignments without the stupid books. You used to be able to go to the library and look at the text books.. Now these stupid books have apps.
Sadly I think that reality is just an American one (I hope), in the UK I was either just given an old copy of the same textbook to keep or the ability to borrow it for the whole year from the library, depending on the book.
Depending on what exactly they are, these books may be practically worthless. I recently looked into selling some of my old college textbooks (that were $50-100 each at purchase), and they currently list online for <$5 each. Old editions are of no use to current students, and there's no demand for previous editions (while there's a good deal of supply).
It’s mostly to do with testing questions changing every year, and nothing else. Which is gross and reason 8114 that academic publishing companies should have their boards vivisected.
Jesus, in Wales too, they're usually pretty good for being incredibly pro-environment!
I think you should send this to your local papers tbh, shame the bastards into doing something good like recycling them or giving them to charity
This is very rage bait.
I guarantee that pile of is 50 copies of the fifth edition and the only difference between the fourth and fifth edition is the introduction by the asshole who wrote it telling you they can’t believe they are on the fifth edition of the text book he wrote 25 years ago.
Some textbooks might be still useful. I have several old math, physics, etc. books, they're still very useful.
The old reason to get a newer text book is that it's sometimes has a more clear explanation on a subject, or can include better diagrams and images. I remember looking at some older physics book and the info was so dense it made it hard to digest. This was ~2000 so books must have been from the 50s-70s
Would you mind crosspost this on !dumpsterdiving@slrpnk.net?
This is a very good content and work you're doing here. Some textbooks goes quickly out of date. After 3~5 years some aren't relevant enough to be still bought them rather that the last version so they cannot be handed down so much but a few hands down of a book can help so much financially. And there is still plenty of use for an out-of-date book.
I came across a similar sight once when I was at university. An old tenured professor had retired (or died) and they’d dumped his office in a bin like this. Was kinda sad to see. Especially the numerous phd thesis papers. I browsed a few. Many had been professionally bound and had sincere, handwritten inscriptions, thanking the professor for his guidance and advice, etc.
There was also hundreds of issues of a super old computing magazine that the guy had obviously subscribed to. I grabbed a couple for my coffee table cuz they’re retro and rad as hell. Someday I’ll take pics and post them to !computermag_covers@feddit.org
