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.
Omg I want to pillage it. I used the library for most of my textbooks and regret not also buying a cheap outdated copy. It's not like the principles of electricity or statics/dynamics were changing anytime in my lifetime
if anything these textbooks wont help, if they constantly make new editions adding removing, content, or updating stem/or other research.
These might just be dissertations or bound volumes of old journals. Textbooks often have some cover art whereas a lot of these don't.
There's a lot of old paper that gets very rarely consulted.
Someone should rescue all those books and donate them to a good cause destructively scan them to feed AI models
What university provides textbooks to students? Assuming this isn't AI generated, there is one text dated 1999 - that's way out of date for scientific texts.
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.
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 would so come with a truck and load up from that "dumpster dive". That is a lot of potentially golden knowledge - with an increasing AI and digital focus, suddenly such things are worth parsing through and preserving in some way.
Fuuuuck wish we were there rn we would grab so many books
Some textbooks might be still useful. I have several old math, physics, etc. books, they're still very useful.
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.
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.
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
Jesus, in Wales too, they're usually pretty good for being incredibly pro-environment!
I think you should send this to your local papers tbh, shame the bastards into doing something good like recycling them or giving them to charity
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