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[OC] Academic textbooks being discarded from abandoned university buildings. More photos in post.
(media.piefed.social)
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.
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).
I'm guessing that the big books are old collections of scientific journals. Depending on the journal, you could have multiple of those tomes per year. These days scientists access journals digitally, so there's little benefit to keeping the physical copies around in most cases
When I was selling my books one semester, the bookstore (which kindly repurchased texts in good condition) offered me a coupon for half off a mediocre pizza. For all my books that semester.
I did not take the coupon
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.
Well training books for a specific examen get less relevant every 3 years or so as testing condition slightly evolve even if pass exams aren't.
It really depends on the subject; mathematics for instance probably isn't going to change much decade to decade, but psychology is changing constantly.
Genetics: my professor was the text author. He said that the information in chapter [let's pretend it's # 27] was bleeding edge when he wrote it six months prior to publishing, but it was out of date by the time it published and was very out of date now, a year later.
He gave us all his notes on the current version of the chapter and told us about the research coming in a few weeks that up render his new chapter obsolete so don't study too close.
I can't imagine publishing an up to date genetics text
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.
The amazing profs will include practice question lists for multiple editions, but that's a lot of work.
The good ones stick to one edition of the book for a number of years, so that you can buy used books.
These days they often don't get a choice in the matter
Considering AI companies are now buying up books written pre-2022, those should still have value.
They only need one book.
Came here to say this. Most of these books are probably superseded by newer versions and/or already archived. Also, if these books have spent a lifetime untouched in a university, how useful are they, really?
Yeah but these might come in handy in the future, when all you'll find will be the 2+2=5, 0% woke editions