Rules:
1.. Please mark original photos with [OC] in the title if you're the photographer
2..Pictures containing a politician from any country or planet are prohibited, this is a community voted on rule.
3.. Image must be a photograph, no AI or digital art.
4.. No NSFW/Cosplay/Spam/Trolling images.
5.. Be civil. No racism or bigotry.
Photo of the Week Rule(s):
1.. On Fridays, the most upvoted original, marked [OC], photo posted between Friday and Thursday will be the next week's banner and featured photo.
2.. The weekly photos will be saved for an end of the year run off.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://mastodon.world/about
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.
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.
In the US, even if we buy a second-hand textbook, we still need to pay for the software that goes along with it. We're scammed either way.
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
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.
Fuuuuck wish we were there rn we would grab so many books
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
Someone should rescue all those books and ~~donate them to a good cause~~ destructively scan them to feed AI models
Wouldn't that potentially poison the well with potentially outdated or incorrect information?
Isn't that the point?
That's honestly a good use case for out of date textbook which knowledge is not useful anymore.
Can I toss a book of lewd poetry about chili in there first?
Would be better than letting them get rained on and thrown away
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.
No worries, done. I couldn't see a way to crosspost from Piefed on the web, but Voyager on iOS seemed to let me do it no problem.
It don't seems to have worked. I'm going to ping you under a comment that shows how to crosspost from PieFed on a mobile browser. The icon is the same on a computer.
That icon didn’t exist on Piefed on Safari on a Mac for this post when I was trying initially. After cross posting using Voyager on an iPhone, the icon is visible on the mobile version of the site. It shows that’s it’s been cross posted.
I finally see it. I don't know why I didn't before. Thank you for being patient with me (^_^)
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
Considering AI companies are now buying up books written pre-2022, those should still have value.
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.
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
This is a thing at my university (I work there). I talked to one of the library folks about it years ago. She explained that (a) they would like to keep way more of the books but there's not enough funding to have the space or staff for it--our school is in constant and recently much more intense financial crisis, laying off all kinds of people (except deans and provosts); (b) a lot of this stuff literally nobody wants, like 4th and 5th and 10th copies of mediocre textbooks rehashing the content done much better by other texts, and (c) yes, if I wanted to fill my car with books and rescue them I was welcome to do so.
My local library does not have university library volume. When they built a new library for the town (third one in my lifetime!) they made sure to put a room for the Friends of the Library Chronic Used Book Sale. They still pulped so many copies of twilight
Across the pond, we're in the early stages of that. 😑
