[HN Gopher] We're Drowning in Old Books. But Getting Rid of Them...
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We're Drowning in Old Books. But Getting Rid of Them Is
Heartbreaking
Author : andrewl
Score : 36 points
Date : 2022-12-18 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| AntoniusBlock wrote:
| 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.
| hippich wrote:
| > Booklice are rarely damaging inside homes and are harmless to
| people or pets. Booklice usually feed on molds, fungi, grains,
| insect fragments, and other starchy material, including glue
| from bookbindings. In homes, psocids typically are found in
| damp, warm, undisturbed places where mold and fungi are
| growing.
|
| Certainly having a yuck factor, but seems harmless? Perhaps
| even good if it eats mold?
| mpol wrote:
| Looking at Wikipedia, the air might have been too humid in the
| old house. Ventilating or heating might have helped.
| Tumilan wrote:
| 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.
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| I don't know. Some of my fondest memory as a child was roaming
| the old childhood libraries of my mother and uncle while
| staying with my grand parents. It looked to me like a treasure
| trove which would never deplete. I don't buy as many books as I
| used to nowadays and most of my reading happens on screen but I
| still feel something special when I hold a book.
| woleium wrote:
| Buut, someone must want my copy of 'powercalc for dummies' from
| 1991?
| yummypaint wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Please see my top level post in this thread. I am willing to
| cover your postage costs to get your collection to the Internet
| Archive if you decide to preserve them with that org. Drop an
| email in your profile long enough for me to see it and I'll
| reach out OOB.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040555
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It's probably been a decade since I last used them but there
| were two book swapping services, I used to belong to that would
| handle matchmaking of people who had books the other wanted and
| then you could print a shipping label at home if you had a
| printer (they were still common at the time). For small
| paperbacks, you could even print out the postal details on a
| regular sheet of paper and then wrap it around the book and
| tape it up, ready to be picked up by the post office. Using the
| media mail rate kept things reasonable, especially for standard
| size books.
| dehrmann wrote:
| That's part of why they picked $15. It discourages used sales.
| hippich wrote:
| Not to take away from anything you said, but in case someone
| didn't know, USPS offers shipping for "media" (dvd, books, cds,
| etc) which is often cheaper -
| https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-Media-Mail-Book-Rate
| downut wrote:
| 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.
| mpol wrote:
| 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.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| 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.
| SiVal wrote:
| Two great arguments for digital readers for people like your
| mother and me: vision and size & weight.
|
| You love to read, but it gets physically more difficult as your
| eyes age. With a digital reader, every book is a "large print
| edition" with good lighting.
|
| And when you travel, you have to take several books because,
| well, duh! You have to have books when you travel. Obviously.
| But carrying heavy books is a (literal and literary) pain. And
| airlines are getting so stingy about baggage limits that I'm
| surprised they aren't yet charging extra if you want to wear
| shoes. You can put a whole library in a reader the size and
| weight of a shoe and take it when you travel.
|
| Of course some books are precious physical artifacts (to me)
| for whatever reason. I MUST keep those, but they are a
| minority. Most of the books I want to keep are wanted for their
| content, not their physical form, and those I'll get rid of if
| I can keep the content in digital form.
| throw6383878 wrote:
| willnonya wrote:
| "people have other problems"
|
| You certainly seem to have some.
|
| I have a large digital library but that does not mean that they
| approach the value of an actual bound book. Especially one with
| fond memories attached.
|
| I am not a boomer but i found your remark teeming with
| ignorance and misplaced emotion.
|
| You'll see this same attachment in people who keep drawers full
| of old phones or just keepsakes from old trips and adventures
| that an outsider would only see as garbage.
|
| Really, it just seems ironic to come on here being bitter and
| hateful while complaining about boomers...
| throw6383878 wrote:
| >owns 12,000 books, mostly fiction, kept in 19th-century
| wooden cases with glass doors in her New York apartment
|
| Maybe I should write it from "privilege" point of view. Many
| people do not have their own rooms, sleep in their cars, or
| stay with abusive partners just for housing. They do not haul
| around any books, but that does not mean, they are any less
| educated.
|
| I really do not see why people expect congratulations or
| sympathy, for their book hoarding. Rich people problems!
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Don't feed the trolls; just flag it or email the moderators
| and let them take care of it.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| nkurz wrote:
| https://archive.vn/j6nCi
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Libraries are pulping old books en mass. Your donations might
| go to a sale. If they don't sell they will be destroyed.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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)
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