> Getting rid of books is part of running a library It depends on what kind of library we are talking about. Local public libraries, K-12 school libraries – t

> Getting rid of books is part of running a library It depends on what kind of library we are talking about. Local public libraries, K-12 school libraries – they throw out books all the time. They have quite limited space, so they can't keep books which are no longer relevant to their target audience. National libraries, research libraries of leading universities – many of them rarely or never throw books out. I remember, when I was a university student, finding IBM 1400 manuals sitting on the shelves in the stacks. They are probably still sitting there. I believe they turned their last 1400 off in the 1970s. I remember borrowing a book, and according to the due date stamp inside its cover, the last person to borrow it before me, had done so 40 years prior. You could tell the books that hadn't been borrowed in a long time, because they still had punch cards in them, from back when the library had used punch cards to track book borrowing. If you actually borrowed such a book, they'd remove the punched card and discard it as part of the borrowing process. I bet if I went back today (20+ years later), there would still be books with punched cards in them.