6 ms·

A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

189 points by mooreds 5mo ago

TFNA 5mo ago
Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me. As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphone.
- crtasm 5mo ago
  any system with pages you "turn" certainly feels very different to reading a webpage (or PDF) with free vertical scrolling
- beej71 5mo ago
  Also, when I (GenX) open my ereader on my phone, I read it just like anything else. And I read paper books, on two e-readers, my phone, and my computer screen. If it's some online article, though, I definitely skim. And I'd skim if it were printed, too.
ciscoriordan 5mo ago
Sensationalism. That's routine collection management. Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-library-acquires-rare-444-year-old-book/ https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...
- TFNA 5mo ago
  Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not dumpstered. Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldn’t yet be called routine. Objecting to this trend is still very much appropriate.
  - ciscoriordan 5mo ago
    You're confusing the other library in the article with the (unnamed) one mentioned in the title, the Chester Fritz Library.
  - canjobear 5mo ago
    Gratuitous destruction of books by librarians has been done for a while. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
  - michaelt 5mo ago
    > Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldn’t yet be called routine. 20 years ago when I was in university, this trend was already picking up steam. First they removed the historical newspaper microfilms (replaced with an online archive which could be searched) Then the academic journals went online, allowing desk-bound academics to access them online. Then the paper journals they had on the shelves got older and older, and the library became less and less a place of research, more and more a collection of textbooks for undergraduates and a place for quiet study. And once the library decided to focus on being a study space, whiteboards and areas for study groups and laptop users became the order of the day. Smart whiteboards and projectors too, this being 20 years ago.
WillAdams 5mo ago
A given library system should have a "last copy" policy, and should keep at least one copy of each book which has been added to their collection --- any which can't afford that need more funding. >Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. --- Anne Herbert When I was very young, my father retired to a rural county in Virginia where the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement library --- for each Scholastic book order, the teacher would remove a couple of books (as well as the promotional poster which my purchases made eligible), then hand me the box and the balance of its contents. Like the furrow's length which I grew to feel in my bones by helping a neighbor plow his garden w/ a horse, I feel that quote in my soul. >A home without books is a body without soul. (or words to that effect) --- Marcus Tullius Cicero/G.K. Chesterton c.f., >No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. --- Harriet Beecher Stowe
roysting 5mo ago
Don’t worry everyone, the Ministry of Truth will make sure we know what we need to know.
- roysting 5mo ago
  The Minions of the Ministry clearly do not approve.
bastawhiz 5mo ago
My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place. I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.
- fhdkweig 5mo ago
  40 years ago, my public middle school would periodically pick books that weren't checked out for a couple decades. They'd rubberstamp "discard" over the library's ownership mark and put them in a pile that said "free books" with the implicit declaration that those books were headed for the landfill. I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book on the neutrino and particle physics. Libraries are always filled to the rafters. The only way to fit new books in is to take old books out. If they didn't, they would only ever have books from the 1940s when they first built that library.
  - WillAdams 5mo ago
    That is what deep basement storage is for. A last copy policy will ensure that when one wants to compare a first edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ against a second, one can get the full weight of Aragorn's snark: >What did you fear that I should say? That I have here a rascal of a rebel dwarf that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?'
    - fhdkweig 5mo ago
      Schools in poor towns don't have multiple levels or basements or even extra storage rooms. What you see is all you get. If there is enough space to have a room full of books, it would be better used as a publicly accessible set of stacks. The only real reason to have a librarian-only room is for books that are rare and valuable.
LaGrange 5mo ago
Some people truly love paper books more than having people read books. It’s one of the more seemingly paradoxical ways anti-intellectualism manifests.
- ceayo 5mo ago
  Without books, what books are they going to read?
  - SauntSolaire 5mo ago
    E-books supposedly, since the parent explicitly specified paper books.
  - bentley 5mo ago
    Other books that are checked out often enough to justify the library keeping them.
  - LaGrange 5mo ago
    Other paper books. Or the same books but electronic or reprinted when the demand is higher. Just not the exact same pieces of highly fetishized dead wood.
SMV279438 5mo ago
I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing. Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them. But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet. I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.
- Walf 5mo ago
  Yes, exploration, discovery. One doesn't stumble across items available on inter-library loan. I could not count the number of books I picked up and enjoyed, even if only for a short while, whilst I was studying at uni.
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    I agree to some degree. But I'd also note that some of the biggest libraries don't have open stacks.
- andrewla 5mo ago
  I have even experienced this in my personal life -- I like in NYC and when I moved here I had to get rid of a ton of books. The ones that I could not bring myself to part with ended up in boxes in my parent's basement where they remain to this day. Many of my fondest memories growing up was browsing the bookshelves in my childhood home, discovering books that I remember to this day. Now I read almost exclusively on my kindle and the browsing experience is just so terrible. I feel I have failed my children in a real way by not giving them access to this.
  - asdff 5mo ago
    Never too late to go back and start up a physical library.
- 5mo ago
kristjansson 5mo ago
> the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them feature books Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.
- ghaff 5mo ago
  Even going back decades, I recall major US university libraries served a dual function as having books, reference librarians, and serving as study and group work spaces. Maybe it's changed a bit but it's not new.
  - kristjansson 5mo ago
    Dual use is definitely not a new thing; sacrificing the ostensible primary use for the secondary seems to raise the author's ire (and mine).
- nitwit005 5mo ago
  Yep, also meeting rooms for various clubs. My university genuinely had a wine tasting club that met in the library.
gammalost 5mo ago
At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm. People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that
- ciscoriordan 5mo ago
  I stayed at an Airbnb that had fake books on the shelves! I looked them up and they aren't even especially cheap. But they probably get stolen a lot less.
  - varun_ch 5mo ago
    I found out recently that you can just buy books. There's businesses who sell books. Not any specific book, but just books to fill shelves to decorate rooms. You can even buy colour coordinated books. https://booksbythefoot.com/ https://booksbythefoot.com/
    - tecleandor 5mo ago
      Also Strand (in NYC) has that service. You can by them by the foot based on color, style, theme... https://www.strandbooks.com/books-by-the-foot/color.html https://www.strandbooks.com/books-by-the-foot/color.html
    - asdff 5mo ago
      Reversed is so crazy.
    - ungreased0675 5mo ago
      While this is a fantastic service for interior decorators, I find the concept of using books as just decorations grotesque.
  - el_io 5mo ago
    What is even a fake book? Like it has a nice cover and nothing inside?
andrewla 5mo ago
I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them. My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/
- ForOldHack 5mo ago
  Dijkstra? What is your go-to Dijkstra paper? His papers are like The short stories of Philip K Dick. Everything seems fine and straight forward, until you step into another world. You are indeed privileged. What you have gained by reading them, is more than an education: It would be a journey, to read them, and your commentary. I picked up a science fiction book, in a recycle bin, that for the most part belonged there, except for one chapter... one short chapter-and after I read it, the world started to swirl... "Human language had by this time, become mostly telepathic." Thank you, Joe Haldeman. And Thank you Edsger W. Dijkstra.
  - andrewla 5mo ago
    I think what I appreciate most are the smaller notes, that probably don't represent a publishable result in any way. There was one where he describes a problem that he had seen in an elementary school -- find a fraction between a/b and c/d. Everyone he talked to had the same basic answer; find a common denominator, find the midpoint, and if necessary, double the denominator. So 2/3 and 3/4 -> 8/12 and 9/12 -> 16/24 & 18/24 -> 17/24. And to him it was immediately obvious that a better answer is just (a+c)/(b+d), which he immediately intuited but then set out to make a better proof for.
    - andrewla 5mo ago
      Dug it up when I got home: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1297.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1297.PDF
anigbrowl 5mo ago
Honestly, I think part of the problem is that around the time librarians rebranded themselves as 'information scientists' they got a bit carried away about how special they were and fell in love with the power of administration - so much more exciting than merely curating books selected by other people.
- gowld 5mo ago
  Why do those "other people" get a free pass to be "in love with the power of administration"?
  - anigbrowl 5mo ago
    In academic libraries, because they are experts in their field.
hcayless 5mo ago
On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection management, and they have to do it in the context of dropping budgets and greater demands for student meeting and study space. What do you expect to happen? Faculty often don’t have any idea how the systems that support them actually function, but things have to actually be made to work.
sailfast 5mo ago
What’s wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some form of art “on the wall” to help one think.
- ceayo 5mo ago
  - E-Books smell awful. - It's fun to collect, to look at what you have. - You can remember the books, by looking at your shelves. - You /actually/ own something, instead of some random variable in Jeff Bezos' database saying you are /allowed to/ read it.
  - gowld 5mo ago
    No one is stopping you from building your own library.
- toomuchtodo 5mo ago
  DRM and control over the knowledge within. This is why the Internet Archive fought and lost against publishers to lend ebooks; their goal was to be a library, not just a long term storage archive. The industry treats ebooks as a license, but first sale doctrine preserves the right for libraries to buy and lend books out at no additional cost per rental period. And so, they can only collect and vault knowledge until copyright laws change, while others are not constrained to share liberally (Anna's Archive, Z-lib, etc). If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.
  - gowld 5mo ago
    > If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls. Yes, that's what funds the creation of culture. If intellectual property is unprotected, then creators of that property are not supported.
deaux 5mo ago
> since a state university’s property, even if it’s been deemed trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals. Gotta love how as hundreds of billions of tax dollars are being misappropriated through corruption, state university books about to be trashed can't be taken home supposedly to prevent corruption. Nothing wrong with throwing away books, but let common sense prevail and people take them home. Down with the oligarchy.
- j_w 5mo ago
  So if you want them just dumpster dive for them.
jjkaczor 5mo ago
As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so, these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool empty libraries picking up random books as a child. OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same". Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, through a destructive process...
- buildsjets 5mo ago
  Digitalization through a destructive process is what was used to train or future overlords. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
  You can get the 8-bay Synology, with its two expansion chassis that's room for about eighteen 24tb drives. Anna's Archive, Libgen, and archive.org provide enough bandwidth that your problem becomes even knowing what titles to download. For the first year or so, you have big long lists of things you know you must have, but even though you didn't quite write them all out (often you just jot down "everything by [author's name]" you eventually finish that up. You start grabbing every book title/cover you see anywhere... and though I'm not particularly proud of it, 4chan often outperforms HN (and though no one would believe it, most of those aren't Mein Kampf). Really, we need a gigantic bibliography project of some sort. These 2648 titles are the core computer science bibliography would be a big help. Or these 17,852 titles are the core 1970s harlequin romance novels. >Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, t He wasn't able to predict that they'd just shred the books without bothering to digitize them though.
  - jjkaczor 5mo ago
    That's actually what I did - upgraded from a 5-bay Synology to an 8-bay in December (before HD prices skyrocketed even further than they had since my last NAS build), still have a couple free slots, but doubled my overall available storage space. eBooks are not the bulk of what is one there though...
ck2 5mo ago
vaguely reminds me of the library massacre at New College * https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/d4018abd-6789-46ea-83bc-092fddc31368/New-College-books-3-ht-jm-240816_1723818686397_hpEmbed.jpg https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/d4018abd-6789-46ea-83bc-092fddc313... * https://abcnews.com/US/books-dumped-en-masse-floridas-new-college-sparking/story?id=112892229 https://abcnews.com/US/books-dumped-en-masse-floridas-new-co...
hedora 5mo ago
It would be nice if there was a rule allowing unwanted books to be destructively scanned and put online in the public domain. Maybe publishers could have the right to purchase the books back at current list price or something if they want to block the shredding.
- zamadatix 5mo ago
  I like the premise but it sounds like something where the overhead in trying to track & manage that would be overly burdensome for all parties until you just forced more reasonable terms on when material enters the public domain in the first place, at which point such a system wouldn't really be needed anyways. The last thing I want to see to try to clean up public access to work is even more complex rules and systems being layered on top of the existing system.
CalChris 5mo ago
Berkeley has the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond, CA for this very purpose. I’ve checked out books where they crackled as I opened them and it was clear I was the first to read them. https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf
arjie 5mo ago
Modern public libraries primarily serve other purposes than paper book lending. University libraries don’t face that constraint but with the Library of Congress and Google we have a safe copy for surviving civilizations. So the only question now is how one accesses the content. I’ve fantasized (like other datahoarders) of personal archives - and I do have a few hundreds of gigabytes of textual content archived for myself and to LORA my machines into. Copyright law does make it hard to have a co-op of book scanners but I can scan all of mine for myself. Perhaps the future will be universal access but in the event it is not, perhaps my children will benefit from the family archive - though a future Primer must necessarily sort out the vast quantities of it that are inexplicably fan fiction erotica.
- Amezarak 5mo ago
  The Library of Congress embarked on a disastrous microfilm initiative concomitant with the destruction of the works being microfilmed that left millions of the only remaining newspaper archives and some books totally or partially unreadable.
  - arjie 5mo ago
    Interesting story. I didn’t know about that. Looking it up, it appears to be well covered and one book Double Fold discusses it extensively. Thank you for sharing.
apitman 5mo ago
Rainbows End
roughly 5mo ago
This paragraph made me chuckle: > When Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her will bequeathed her library to the sons of two friends of hers. The first, William Royall Tyler, Jr., stored his half in a warehouse on the outskirts of London. The other half went to Colin Clark, who let the books molder for decades at his family castle in Kent until financial troubles prompted his brother to begin selling off chunks of it to various dealers in rare books. Clark’s half was painstakingly recovered and brought back to the Mount, but the other half was destroyed in 1941, during the London Blitz. Man plans, and God laughs, as they say.
warumdarum 5mo ago
At least they didnt shredder it and scan the pieces. Thats where the rainbow ends.
tokai 5mo ago
I worked at an university library that was being moved to a new, and smaller, location. We did a lot of weeding. I threw thousands of books in the dumpster. We had to be covert in our work so the student body wouldn't act up. Much like the author here. No library will ever just throw books out randomly. Most works are available from many dozen of other libraries and not even close to lost if thrown out. Inter library loan insures that they can always be gotten should a user need them. Shelve space is not infinite, and books not being used out blocks space for works that are in use. Tools like worldcat and familiarity with the fields the library's collection cover, helps avoid weeding rare and unique works. Librarians are well aware of their library's forte. A single library isn't the world repository of knowledge. The network of collaboration between all national and academic libraries is.
jswelker 5mo ago
I was a real university librarian for a decade. Most of the books they throw away are truly garbage. Yes some libraries take it too far with "weeding" too much, but it is necessary: 1) the space is needed for other purposes (even though funding for said purpose might not be secured) 2) having shelves of useless junk makes discovering useful good stuff much harder 3) the university library has a mandate to support the curriculum of courses being taught, not being a repository of all human writing Yes interlibrary loan UX sucks (although at my library I made it quite good!) and yes interlibrary loan needs to be pushed much harder.
rmason 5mo ago
Mu sister and I gave my late parents sizeable library to the East Lansing public library, a place the entire family adored. They gave us a document that detailed that most of the books would be sold and the money would be used to support the library. We were OK with that and knew in advance that would happen. They have two large sales a year and receive more money than if they just sold them to a broker and the books stay in the community. This doesn't happen everywhere. I have an old friend who like me is a fan of Michigan history. Every time he bought a book on his rural county or its towns he'd give a copy to his local library. Twenty years in he found out they were just selling them to brokers for ten to twenty percent of the cover price. Now he gives the list price of the book to the library with the understanding they use it for books of history.
FiatLuxDave 5mo ago
The Great Pulping is the name, or rather names, that modern historians have given to two legendary events which were supposed to have occured early in the Confusion Era. The first of these events was when libraries converted from a primarly paper-based form of information storage to a digital form. A majority of library book collections were scanned, digitized, and then once the information was stored in digital forms, the books were sold to be pulped in order to free up room for library patrons to use the new system more effectively. Of course, the librarians could not know what was going to happen in the future to all this information, what with the viruses, cross-copying, AI hallucinations, archival rivalries, meme wars, and all the other diverse information-distorting causes of the Confusion. The second event refers to what happened to the librarians who had been responsible for this decision, when the full effects of it became evident. - A legendarium of the Confusion Era, by Franklin Duane, 192 PCE Edition
etempleton 5mo ago
Libraries purge books from their collections continuously all the time. It has happened forever.
giardini 5mo ago
The article's author is only the second person I have known to speak fondly of Derrida, the first being a young relative who lost his soul AND brain to various claptrap at university.
k310 5mo ago
I have 14 totes of nice books, mostly on woodworking, landscaping, lots of cookbooks, and lots of musical scores (some loose, mostly in bound books). I can't give them away. It's enough for hundreds of "Little Free Libraries" and suppose that I built the enclosures in my shop, nobody would put up a base. I would love to see some young person or immigrant learn some useful skills. Prison libraries wouldn't take them, unless I DELIVER them to their doorstep (or gate, I suppose). Nobody cares. That's the state our society is in now. I am reminded of a PhD I worked with who wanted the world on a platter, but DELIVERED to him. I find this syndrome among a lot of people. 1. I want it ALL 2. I want it FREE 3. I want it NOW, and 4. I want it DELIVERED on a SILVER PLATTER. People are just comatose. They talk about doing good, and leave it at the "listen to me" stage. I am reminded of a story by the Venerable Sangharakshita. > From Lecture 095 "The Universal Perspective of Mahayana Buddhism" by Sangharakshita: > Let's suppose that there is a great famine somewhere - the sort of terrible famine that you still get even now sometimes in India. There's no food. Everybody is starving. Everybody is gaunt, famished, skeleton-like. And there's terrible suffering. Now in a certain town in the country where this famine has occurred there happen to be two men who have an enormous quantity of grain, quite enough to feed all of the people. One of the men is old, the other is young. Now, what does the old man do? He puts up a notice outside his front door. And the notice reads: 'Whoever comes will be given food.' > Now what about the young man - what does he do? The young man takes a great sack of grain on his back, and he goes from door to door distributing the grain, and when one sack becomes empty, he rushes back home and gets another one. And in this way distributes a great deal of grain all over the town. He gives the grain away to whoever asks. And he's so keen on getting the grain to the people that he doesn't mind going into the poorest and the dirtiest and the darkest of hovels. He doesn't even mind going into places where respectable people don't usually venture. Because there's only one idea in his mind, and the idea is that everybody must be fed, nobody should be allowed to starve. Not one book should go to the landfill, and I have seen the local library do it, if there is a single person who wants to read and can't afford books. Reminder to everyone. Get off your overused asses and share a little of your "too much and never enough" with others, with emphasis on getting separating fanny from couch. I'll just keep trying. WHY DO I LOVE BOOKS? My Dad used to read books to my brother and me. I learned to read from those books. I gave them to my young daughter. In 1999, I lost both parents, and while I was paying my last respects to Mom, my wife (now ex-wife) asked my daughter if she was reading those "old" books (First editions, mostly, by Thornton Burgess, of "Mother West Wind" fame.) My daughter, being very young, said no, so off they all went to the Goodwill, behind my back, not thinking at all that a young kid had absolutely no way of buying such books, and NOT asking if her Dad gave them to her. But Tiger Moms are like that. That was around Christmas time. Come Eastertime, I wondered where the books went, and found out. Family heirlooms gone. In a form of compensation, I did manage to buy similar, if not identical, books at Moe's Bookstore over time, just so there wouldn't be this big hole in my life. They're on my shelves now. It's my daughter's choice whether to have kids, but at least I closed that loop. Just because you don't value something doesn't mean that it has no value to someone else. Some people think that the world revolves around them, and don't consider what anyone else thinks, wants, needs or values. I will find a way.

189 points by mooreds 5mo ago

TFNA 5mo ago

Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me. As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphone.

crtasm 5mo ago
any system with pages you "turn" certainly feels very different to reading a webpage (or PDF) with free vertical scrolling
beej71 5mo ago
Also, when I (GenX) open my ereader on my phone, I read it just like anything else. And I read paper books, on two e-readers, my phone, and my computer screen. If it's some online article, though, I definitely skim. And I'd skim if it were printed, too.

ciscoriordan 5mo ago

Sensationalism. That's routine collection management. Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-library-acquires-rare-444-year-old-book/ https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...

TFNA 5mo ago
Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not dumpstered. Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldn’t yet be called routine. Objecting to this trend is still very much appropriate.
- ciscoriordan 5mo ago
  You're confusing the other library in the article with the (unnamed) one mentioned in the title, the Chester Fritz Library.
- canjobear 5mo ago
  Gratuitous destruction of books by librarians has been done for a while. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
- michaelt 5mo ago
  > Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldn’t yet be called routine. 20 years ago when I was in university, this trend was already picking up steam. First they removed the historical newspaper microfilms (replaced with an online archive which could be searched) Then the academic journals went online, allowing desk-bound academics to access them online. Then the paper journals they had on the shelves got older and older, and the library became less and less a place of research, more and more a collection of textbooks for undergraduates and a place for quiet study. And once the library decided to focus on being a study space, whiteboards and areas for study groups and laptop users became the order of the day. Smart whiteboards and projectors too, this being 20 years ago.

WillAdams 5mo ago

A given library system should have a "last copy" policy, and should keep at least one copy of each book which has been added to their collection --- any which can't afford that need more funding. >Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. --- Anne Herbert When I was very young, my father retired to a rural county in Virginia where the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement library --- for each Scholastic book order, the teacher would remove a couple of books (as well as the promotional poster which my purchases made eligible), then hand me the box and the balance of its contents. Like the furrow's length which I grew to feel in my bones by helping a neighbor plow his garden w/ a horse, I feel that quote in my soul. >A home without books is a body without soul. (or words to that effect) --- Marcus Tullius Cicero/G.K. Chesterton c.f., >No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. --- Harriet Beecher Stowe

roysting 5mo ago

Don’t worry everyone, the Ministry of Truth will make sure we know what we need to know.

roysting 5mo ago
The Minions of the Ministry clearly do not approve.

bastawhiz 5mo ago

My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place. I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.

fhdkweig 5mo ago
40 years ago, my public middle school would periodically pick books that weren't checked out for a couple decades. They'd rubberstamp "discard" over the library's ownership mark and put them in a pile that said "free books" with the implicit declaration that those books were headed for the landfill. I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book on the neutrino and particle physics. Libraries are always filled to the rafters. The only way to fit new books in is to take old books out. If they didn't, they would only ever have books from the 1940s when they first built that library.
- WillAdams 5mo ago
  That is what deep basement storage is for. A last copy policy will ensure that when one wants to compare a first edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ against a second, one can get the full weight of Aragorn's snark: >What did you fear that I should say? That I have here a rascal of a rebel dwarf that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?'
  - fhdkweig 5mo ago
    Schools in poor towns don't have multiple levels or basements or even extra storage rooms. What you see is all you get. If there is enough space to have a room full of books, it would be better used as a publicly accessible set of stacks. The only real reason to have a librarian-only room is for books that are rare and valuable.

LaGrange 5mo ago

Some people truly love paper books more than having people read books. It’s one of the more seemingly paradoxical ways anti-intellectualism manifests.

ceayo 5mo ago
Without books, what books are they going to read?
- SauntSolaire 5mo ago
  E-books supposedly, since the parent explicitly specified paper books.
- bentley 5mo ago
  Other books that are checked out often enough to justify the library keeping them.
- LaGrange 5mo ago
  Other paper books. Or the same books but electronic or reprinted when the demand is higher. Just not the exact same pieces of highly fetishized dead wood.

SMV279438 5mo ago

I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing. Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them. But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet. I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.

Walf 5mo ago
Yes, exploration, discovery. One doesn't stumble across items available on inter-library loan. I could not count the number of books I picked up and enjoyed, even if only for a short while, whilst I was studying at uni.
- ghaff 5mo ago
  I agree to some degree. But I'd also note that some of the biggest libraries don't have open stacks.
andrewla 5mo ago
I have even experienced this in my personal life -- I like in NYC and when I moved here I had to get rid of a ton of books. The ones that I could not bring myself to part with ended up in boxes in my parent's basement where they remain to this day. Many of my fondest memories growing up was browsing the bookshelves in my childhood home, discovering books that I remember to this day. Now I read almost exclusively on my kindle and the browsing experience is just so terrible. I feel I have failed my children in a real way by not giving them access to this.
- asdff 5mo ago
  Never too late to go back and start up a physical library.
5mo ago

kristjansson 5mo ago

> the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them feature books Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.

ghaff 5mo ago
Even going back decades, I recall major US university libraries served a dual function as having books, reference librarians, and serving as study and group work spaces. Maybe it's changed a bit but it's not new.
- kristjansson 5mo ago
  Dual use is definitely not a new thing; sacrificing the ostensible primary use for the secondary seems to raise the author's ire (and mine).
nitwit005 5mo ago
Yep, also meeting rooms for various clubs. My university genuinely had a wine tasting club that met in the library.

gammalost 5mo ago

At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm. People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that

ciscoriordan 5mo ago
I stayed at an Airbnb that had fake books on the shelves! I looked them up and they aren't even especially cheap. But they probably get stolen a lot less.
- varun_ch 5mo ago
  I found out recently that you can just buy books. There's businesses who sell books. Not any specific book, but just books to fill shelves to decorate rooms. You can even buy colour coordinated books. https://booksbythefoot.com/ https://booksbythefoot.com/
  - tecleandor 5mo ago
    Also Strand (in NYC) has that service. You can by them by the foot based on color, style, theme... https://www.strandbooks.com/books-by-the-foot/color.html https://www.strandbooks.com/books-by-the-foot/color.html
  - asdff 5mo ago
    Reversed is so crazy.
  - ungreased0675 5mo ago
    While this is a fantastic service for interior decorators, I find the concept of using books as just decorations grotesque.
- el_io 5mo ago
  What is even a fake book? Like it has a nice cover and nothing inside?

andrewla 5mo ago

I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them. My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/

ForOldHack 5mo ago
Dijkstra? What is your go-to Dijkstra paper? His papers are like The short stories of Philip K Dick. Everything seems fine and straight forward, until you step into another world. You are indeed privileged. What you have gained by reading them, is more than an education: It would be a journey, to read them, and your commentary. I picked up a science fiction book, in a recycle bin, that for the most part belonged there, except for one chapter... one short chapter-and after I read it, the world started to swirl... "Human language had by this time, become mostly telepathic." Thank you, Joe Haldeman. And Thank you Edsger W. Dijkstra.
- andrewla 5mo ago
  I think what I appreciate most are the smaller notes, that probably don't represent a publishable result in any way. There was one where he describes a problem that he had seen in an elementary school -- find a fraction between a/b and c/d. Everyone he talked to had the same basic answer; find a common denominator, find the midpoint, and if necessary, double the denominator. So 2/3 and 3/4 -> 8/12 and 9/12 -> 16/24 & 18/24 -> 17/24. And to him it was immediately obvious that a better answer is just (a+c)/(b+d), which he immediately intuited but then set out to make a better proof for.
  - andrewla 5mo ago
    Dug it up when I got home: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1297.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1297.PDF

anigbrowl 5mo ago

Honestly, I think part of the problem is that around the time librarians rebranded themselves as 'information scientists' they got a bit carried away about how special they were and fell in love with the power of administration - so much more exciting than merely curating books selected by other people.

gowld 5mo ago
Why do those "other people" get a free pass to be "in love with the power of administration"?
- anigbrowl 5mo ago
  In academic libraries, because they are experts in their field.

hcayless 5mo ago

On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection management, and they have to do it in the context of dropping budgets and greater demands for student meeting and study space. What do you expect to happen? Faculty often don’t have any idea how the systems that support them actually function, but things have to actually be made to work.

sailfast 5mo ago

What’s wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some form of art “on the wall” to help one think.

ceayo 5mo ago
- E-Books smell awful. - It's fun to collect, to look at what you have. - You can remember the books, by looking at your shelves. - You /actually/ own something, instead of some random variable in Jeff Bezos' database saying you are /allowed to/ read it.
- gowld 5mo ago
  No one is stopping you from building your own library.
toomuchtodo 5mo ago
DRM and control over the knowledge within. This is why the Internet Archive fought and lost against publishers to lend ebooks; their goal was to be a library, not just a long term storage archive. The industry treats ebooks as a license, but first sale doctrine preserves the right for libraries to buy and lend books out at no additional cost per rental period. And so, they can only collect and vault knowledge until copyright laws change, while others are not constrained to share liberally (Anna's Archive, Z-lib, etc). If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.
- gowld 5mo ago
  > If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls. Yes, that's what funds the creation of culture. If intellectual property is unprotected, then creators of that property are not supported.

deaux 5mo ago

> since a state university’s property, even if it’s been deemed trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals. Gotta love how as hundreds of billions of tax dollars are being misappropriated through corruption, state university books about to be trashed can't be taken home supposedly to prevent corruption. Nothing wrong with throwing away books, but let common sense prevail and people take them home. Down with the oligarchy.

j_w 5mo ago
So if you want them just dumpster dive for them.

jjkaczor 5mo ago

As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so, these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool empty libraries picking up random books as a child. OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same". Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, through a destructive process...

buildsjets 5mo ago
Digitalization through a destructive process is what was used to train or future overlords. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
You can get the 8-bay Synology, with its two expansion chassis that's room for about eighteen 24tb drives. Anna's Archive, Libgen, and archive.org provide enough bandwidth that your problem becomes even knowing what titles to download. For the first year or so, you have big long lists of things you know you must have, but even though you didn't quite write them all out (often you just jot down "everything by [author's name]" you eventually finish that up. You start grabbing every book title/cover you see anywhere... and though I'm not particularly proud of it, 4chan often outperforms HN (and though no one would believe it, most of those aren't Mein Kampf). Really, we need a gigantic bibliography project of some sort. These 2648 titles are the core computer science bibliography would be a big help. Or these 17,852 titles are the core 1970s harlequin romance novels. >Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, t He wasn't able to predict that they'd just shred the books without bothering to digitize them though.
- jjkaczor 5mo ago
  That's actually what I did - upgraded from a 5-bay Synology to an 8-bay in December (before HD prices skyrocketed even further than they had since my last NAS build), still have a couple free slots, but doubled my overall available storage space. eBooks are not the bulk of what is one there though...

ck2 5mo ago

vaguely reminds me of the library massacre at New College * https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/d4018abd-6789-46ea-83bc-092fddc31368/New-College-books-3-ht-jm-240816_1723818686397_hpEmbed.jpg https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/d4018abd-6789-46ea-83bc-092fddc313... * https://abcnews.com/US/books-dumped-en-masse-floridas-new-college-sparking/story?id=112892229 https://abcnews.com/US/books-dumped-en-masse-floridas-new-co...

hedora 5mo ago

It would be nice if there was a rule allowing unwanted books to be destructively scanned and put online in the public domain. Maybe publishers could have the right to purchase the books back at current list price or something if they want to block the shredding.

zamadatix 5mo ago
I like the premise but it sounds like something where the overhead in trying to track & manage that would be overly burdensome for all parties until you just forced more reasonable terms on when material enters the public domain in the first place, at which point such a system wouldn't really be needed anyways. The last thing I want to see to try to clean up public access to work is even more complex rules and systems being layered on top of the existing system.

CalChris 5mo ago

Berkeley has the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond, CA for this very purpose. I’ve checked out books where they crackled as I opened them and it was clear I was the first to read them. https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf

arjie 5mo ago

Modern public libraries primarily serve other purposes than paper book lending. University libraries don’t face that constraint but with the Library of Congress and Google we have a safe copy for surviving civilizations. So the only question now is how one accesses the content. I’ve fantasized (like other datahoarders) of personal archives - and I do have a few hundreds of gigabytes of textual content archived for myself and to LORA my machines into. Copyright law does make it hard to have a co-op of book scanners but I can scan all of mine for myself. Perhaps the future will be universal access but in the event it is not, perhaps my children will benefit from the family archive - though a future Primer must necessarily sort out the vast quantities of it that are inexplicably fan fiction erotica.

Amezarak 5mo ago
The Library of Congress embarked on a disastrous microfilm initiative concomitant with the destruction of the works being microfilmed that left millions of the only remaining newspaper archives and some books totally or partially unreadable.
- arjie 5mo ago
  Interesting story. I didn’t know about that. Looking it up, it appears to be well covered and one book Double Fold discusses it extensively. Thank you for sharing.

apitman 5mo ago

Rainbows End

roughly 5mo ago

This paragraph made me chuckle: > When Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her will bequeathed her library to the sons of two friends of hers. The first, William Royall Tyler, Jr., stored his half in a warehouse on the outskirts of London. The other half went to Colin Clark, who let the books molder for decades at his family castle in Kent until financial troubles prompted his brother to begin selling off chunks of it to various dealers in rare books. Clark’s half was painstakingly recovered and brought back to the Mount, but the other half was destroyed in 1941, during the London Blitz. Man plans, and God laughs, as they say.

warumdarum 5mo ago

At least they didnt shredder it and scan the pieces. Thats where the rainbow ends.

tokai 5mo ago

I worked at an university library that was being moved to a new, and smaller, location. We did a lot of weeding. I threw thousands of books in the dumpster. We had to be covert in our work so the student body wouldn't act up. Much like the author here. No library will ever just throw books out randomly. Most works are available from many dozen of other libraries and not even close to lost if thrown out. Inter library loan insures that they can always be gotten should a user need them. Shelve space is not infinite, and books not being used out blocks space for works that are in use. Tools like worldcat and familiarity with the fields the library's collection cover, helps avoid weeding rare and unique works. Librarians are well aware of their library's forte. A single library isn't the world repository of knowledge. The network of collaboration between all national and academic libraries is.

jswelker 5mo ago

I was a real university librarian for a decade. Most of the books they throw away are truly garbage. Yes some libraries take it too far with "weeding" too much, but it is necessary: 1) the space is needed for other purposes (even though funding for said purpose might not be secured) 2) having shelves of useless junk makes discovering useful good stuff much harder 3) the university library has a mandate to support the curriculum of courses being taught, not being a repository of all human writing Yes interlibrary loan UX sucks (although at my library I made it quite good!) and yes interlibrary loan needs to be pushed much harder.

rmason 5mo ago

Mu sister and I gave my late parents sizeable library to the East Lansing public library, a place the entire family adored. They gave us a document that detailed that most of the books would be sold and the money would be used to support the library. We were OK with that and knew in advance that would happen. They have two large sales a year and receive more money than if they just sold them to a broker and the books stay in the community. This doesn't happen everywhere. I have an old friend who like me is a fan of Michigan history. Every time he bought a book on his rural county or its towns he'd give a copy to his local library. Twenty years in he found out they were just selling them to brokers for ten to twenty percent of the cover price. Now he gives the list price of the book to the library with the understanding they use it for books of history.

FiatLuxDave 5mo ago

The Great Pulping is the name, or rather names, that modern historians have given to two legendary events which were supposed to have occured early in the Confusion Era. The first of these events was when libraries converted from a primarly paper-based form of information storage to a digital form. A majority of library book collections were scanned, digitized, and then once the information was stored in digital forms, the books were sold to be pulped in order to free up room for library patrons to use the new system more effectively. Of course, the librarians could not know what was going to happen in the future to all this information, what with the viruses, cross-copying, AI hallucinations, archival rivalries, meme wars, and all the other diverse information-distorting causes of the Confusion. The second event refers to what happened to the librarians who had been responsible for this decision, when the full effects of it became evident. - A legendarium of the Confusion Era, by Franklin Duane, 192 PCE Edition

etempleton 5mo ago

Libraries purge books from their collections continuously all the time. It has happened forever.

giardini 5mo ago

The article's author is only the second person I have known to speak fondly of Derrida, the first being a young relative who lost his soul AND brain to various claptrap at university.

k310 5mo ago

I have 14 totes of nice books, mostly on woodworking, landscaping, lots of cookbooks, and lots of musical scores (some loose, mostly in bound books). I can't give them away. It's enough for hundreds of "Little Free Libraries" and suppose that I built the enclosures in my shop, nobody would put up a base. I would love to see some young person or immigrant learn some useful skills. Prison libraries wouldn't take them, unless I DELIVER them to their doorstep (or gate, I suppose). Nobody cares. That's the state our society is in now. I am reminded of a PhD I worked with who wanted the world on a platter, but DELIVERED to him. I find this syndrome among a lot of people. 1. I want it ALL 2. I want it FREE 3. I want it NOW, and 4. I want it DELIVERED on a SILVER PLATTER. People are just comatose. They talk about doing good, and leave it at the "listen to me" stage. I am reminded of a story by the Venerable Sangharakshita. > From Lecture 095 "The Universal Perspective of Mahayana Buddhism" by Sangharakshita: > Let's suppose that there is a great famine somewhere - the sort of terrible famine that you still get even now sometimes in India. There's no food. Everybody is starving. Everybody is gaunt, famished, skeleton-like. And there's terrible suffering. Now in a certain town in the country where this famine has occurred there happen to be two men who have an enormous quantity of grain, quite enough to feed all of the people. One of the men is old, the other is young. Now, what does the old man do? He puts up a notice outside his front door. And the notice reads: 'Whoever comes will be given food.' > Now what about the young man - what does he do? The young man takes a great sack of grain on his back, and he goes from door to door distributing the grain, and when one sack becomes empty, he rushes back home and gets another one. And in this way distributes a great deal of grain all over the town. He gives the grain away to whoever asks. And he's so keen on getting the grain to the people that he doesn't mind going into the poorest and the dirtiest and the darkest of hovels. He doesn't even mind going into places where respectable people don't usually venture. Because there's only one idea in his mind, and the idea is that everybody must be fed, nobody should be allowed to starve. Not one book should go to the landfill, and I have seen the local library do it, if there is a single person who wants to read and can't afford books. Reminder to everyone. Get off your overused asses and share a little of your "too much and never enough" with others, with emphasis on getting separating fanny from couch. I'll just keep trying. WHY DO I LOVE BOOKS? My Dad used to read books to my brother and me. I learned to read from those books. I gave them to my young daughter. In 1999, I lost both parents, and while I was paying my last respects to Mom, my wife (now ex-wife) asked my daughter if she was reading those "old" books (First editions, mostly, by Thornton Burgess, of "Mother West Wind" fame.) My daughter, being very young, said no, so off they all went to the Goodwill, behind my back, not thinking at all that a young kid had absolutely no way of buying such books, and NOT asking if her Dad gave them to her. But Tiger Moms are like that. That was around Christmas time. Come Eastertime, I wondered where the books went, and found out. Family heirlooms gone. In a form of compensation, I did manage to buy similar, if not identical, books at Moe's Bookstore over time, just so there wouldn't be this big hole in my life. They're on my shelves now. It's my daughter's choice whether to have kids, but at least I closed that loop. Just because you don't value something doesn't mean that it has no value to someone else. Some people think that the world revolves around them, and don't consider what anyone else thinks, wants, needs or values. I will find a way.