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 I used the library for most of my textbooks and regret not also buying a cheap outdated copy.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 A lot of the stuff in them is outdated, but they’re still a snapshot of the world from a different time.
Our understanding of a lot of things becomes outdated pretty quickly. Like sociology, medicine, psychology, even ideas about literature and philosophy change.
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.
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 Assuming this isn’t AI generated, there is one text dated 1999 - that’s way out of date for scientific texts.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.
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.
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.
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
OMG absolutely, I stopped selling text books in my second year in Uni and I have used a number of them many times since, both professionally and personally.
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.
It really depends on the subject; mathematics for instance probably isn’t going to change much decade to decade, but psychology is changing constantly.
Their tactic is to change the homework questions and reorder some stuff every year so they can force everyone to buy new textbooks.
The actual content changes very little.
Some professors will just copy the new questions and hand them out so kids can get used books.
Someone should rescue all those books and
donate them to a good causedestructively scan them to feed AI modelsThat’s honestly a good use case for out of date textbook which knowledge is not useful anymore.
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.
How out of date are they? If they’re college textbooks they were trash 1-2 years after publication because profs require the latest editions.
Depends on who your professor was. I worked as an engineering lecturer for a few years. I told my students that having a reference text can be invaluable as you move through your career. For certain kinds of engineering, this is absolutely true. Paper reference texts have little long-term value in computer engineering. But civil or mechanical engineering? The principles of material strength do not change. And that’s the kind of engineering I teach. So I really encourage students to get paper reference texts.
To facilitate this, I would always post homeworks that included scans of the full problems. I either wrote the problems from scratch or cut out problems from the textbook. I then told students to still buy the book, but buy a few editions back to get their reference text for a song. I still want my students to have a permanent physical book, but if you design your course right, they won’t need the newest edition.
plenty of teachers teach without textbooks.
Making these particular books worth even less
Fuuuuck wish we were there rn we would grab so many books
And do nothing with them.
Hate to tell you this but we love reading?? Lol and theres more than likely a lot of topics we would be interested in.
![[OC] Academic textbooks being discarded from abandoned university buildings. More photos in post.](https://media.piefed.social/posts/3P/lr/3PlrLZZPYodyspS.jpg){kind=link}