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.
Not with textbooks. We bought textbooks required for courses. As for books in libraries...a huge number of thick volumes were indexes for manual searching. Modern university libraries are meeting rooms, everything was digitized over a decade ago.
No thanks to carrying around 15 kilos of physics and chemistry texts, or trying to chase one copy of a book in the library, then finding some ambitious asshole ruined the pages. We no longer waste money on paper journals and binding volumes every year. Old journals just took up space in research buildings. Storing, moving, indexing all that paper costs money.
I've never assigned a textbook for any of my courses, they are not current enough and science can leap month to month in some fields. Students access primary papers via institution open digital subscriptions. We are saving a lot of shoulder injuries.