alt.hn

6/12/2026 at 2:21:22 PM

A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

 https://yalereview.org/article/sheila-liming-the-end-of-books

by mooreds

6/12/2026 at 4:19:51 PM

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.

by bastawhiz

6/12/2026 at 4:26:36 PM

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.

by fhdkweig

6/12/2026 at 4:48:49 PM

I picked up a fun university library discard the other day (month). This one is about Lunar geology. The concept of the book is so inspiring to me: "it's 1975, we brought home a lot of samples from the moon now; so what did we learn". It was fun to look through that one - a snapshot of a very exciting time.

(Taylor, Lunar Science: A post-Apollo view)

by kzrdude

6/12/2026 at 6:58:10 PM

Yeah, this part of the article made me sad:

> a state university’s property, even if it’s been deemed trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals.

What a waste! Sure, allowing something like this could (and probably would) be abused, but I think the waste is worse.

I'm glad your middle school was able to do what they did!

by kelnos

6/12/2026 at 7:24:00 PM

I wonder if they could have transferred it to a separate nonprofit, and then that nonprofit has no restrictions on whom it is transferred or sold to?

by eutropia

6/12/2026 at 11:16:43 PM

Many libraries have a Friends organization that receives books culled from the library's collections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_Libraries

The Friends are a separate nonprofit from the library, usually run by volunteers. They can also accept donations from the public, keeping books out of dumpsters. They organize regular book sales which are generally popular with the reading public. https://action.everylibrary.org/from_book_sales_to_big_impac...

If you think that books should be kept out of the landfill or the shredder, please consider starting a Friends group for your local library. https://www.ala.org/united/friends

National Friends of Libraries Week is usually the third week of October every year. https://www.ala.org/united/events_conferences/folweek

by e15ctr0n

6/12/2026 at 10:03:53 PM

One trick state legislatures hate!

by cwmoore

6/12/2026 at 7:16:35 PM

My local town library has a book sale every fall and you can take away a paper bag of books for $10. It's not practical for every small library, in particular, to hold onto every book forever.

by ghaff

6/12/2026 at 10:44:12 PM

They don't have surplus sales?

I know the universe I went to did. Price it all at a penny each.

by themaninthedark

6/13/2026 at 2:31:48 AM

Even libraries that go to the trouble of doing this throw away probably a thousand books for every one they can sell.

by etempleton

6/13/2026 at 1:54:09 PM

That depends on the structure and scale of the sale. Our local library sells most of the books at the biannual sales. Granted, many of those sell for very little; prices decline over several weeks so the things discarded wouldn't sell even for pennies.

by pfdietz

6/12/2026 at 11:36:08 PM

they do and it's usually an auction but at a penny each is not worth the time to even post it. Also, not many people are buying old books unless they are collectibles. So more than just books go straight into the dump.

by fhn

6/12/2026 at 7:46:00 PM

In the town where I live, surplus books from the library, and donated books, are sold twice a year over several weekends. As time goes on at these events the price drops, until on the last day it's $1 for a paper grocery bag full. Those that remain go into a dumpster for pulping and recycling.

It's quite an event with long lines to get in and is loved by all. The money raised is used to buy more books for the library.

https://booksale.org/

by pfdietz

6/12/2026 at 4:45:17 PM

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?'

by WillAdams

6/12/2026 at 4:49:38 PM

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.

by fhdkweig

6/12/2026 at 4:56:14 PM

As I implied elsethread, the solution for that is better funding.

Someone needs to take up Carnegie's mantle and finish the job which he began.

by WillAdams

6/12/2026 at 5:06:55 PM

You need a limiting principle or there is no limit to the "better funding" you're asking for until you have a Library of Congress in every small town in America, to no positive effect.

What's the limiting principle you propose? It has to be something real libraries and library funding sources can take action on, because they have to take real-world actions on them. So this is not a time for aspirational speeches or vague exhortations to "do more", which is the exact opposite of a limiting principle anyhow. What is "enough"?

by jerf

6/12/2026 at 6:05:12 PM

The limiting principle should be that for a given ILL region/system, there is at least one copy of each book/edition which entered that system which can be loaned out.

As I noted, it's a pain for me to have to drive down to DC to get access to a book which _used_ to be in the local library system, but isn't anymore, or to purchase my own copy (which wasn't previously necessary).

by WillAdams

6/12/2026 at 11:25:40 PM

> to no positive effect.

This is a REALLY bold assumption you’re making here, and frankly until we’ve tried it I don’t think you can argue that it has no positive effect to put tons of books in every small town everywhere.

by throwaway173738

6/12/2026 at 5:07:53 PM

Most books are not worth saving.

by bluGill

6/12/2026 at 6:50:23 PM

I used to work in a bookstore, and I've been working in libraries almost my entire career. Most books have no value. I've probably thrown out a million books in my life; most of them have been diet books, cook books, and political biographies.

My current library is around 2000 square feet and I acquire around 1000 books a year, so I have to toss around 1000 books a year, because they're made of matter and take up space.

by S_Bear

6/13/2026 at 7:42:58 PM

It's a bit less of a thing than it used to be, but disposable books on technology were a thing for quite a while too. Think titles like "iPhone 6 for Dummies", "Learn Flash in 24 Hours", or "Windows 8 for Seniors" - there are a lot of books which were written (usually on the cheap) for a specific audience at a specific time, and which have no enduring value.

Also along these lines: test prep and study guide books. Same deal really.

by duskwuff

6/12/2026 at 11:36:07 PM

Goodwill is a much more accurate slice of “what is published” than any library is.

by bombcar

6/12/2026 at 6:59:53 PM

Sure, there are always solutions, and many of them usually involve more money. But that money usually doesn't just magically appear, even with plenty of Carnegie-types these days looking to whitewash their reputations through philanthropy. The money often is the problem that needs to be solved, and there's just no source for those funds.

by kelnos

6/12/2026 at 7:35:21 PM

What's stopping you?

by webnrrd2k

6/12/2026 at 7:48:52 PM

Society is completely overloaded with a vast surplus of commercial property. Something can be done

by AtlasBarfed

6/12/2026 at 5:07:15 PM

That is what big national central libraries are for. Hopefully government funded libraries actually properly archiving everything printed in the country.

by Ekaros

6/12/2026 at 9:33:02 PM

> That is what deep basement storage is for.

That's what scanned books are for. Didn't google already scan them all? And then the book publishers shut that down?

by WalterBright

6/12/2026 at 5:23:23 PM

This is a brilliant observation, in regards to the first edition's depiction of Gollum.

In the first edition, he was depicted as a large creature, and Tolkien was upset about it, and in the second edition, changed the description to small.

This information was gathered by a rare book seller who's videos I find immensely interesting.

by ForOldHack

6/12/2026 at 6:13:43 PM

A big problem with accessibility is that interlibrary loan is awful for browsing.

I rarely go to a library to loan a specific work - I go there to find a work. This means going through dozens of potentially-relevant titles, taking them off the shelf, quickly browsing through them, and taking the one or two best ones home. This entire workflow becomes impossible if the book isn't readily available.

A book hidden in a box in the basement, or which arrives after only a few days, might as well not exist at all. I'm simply not going to scroll through a list, order several dozen books solely by their title alone, and come back a few days later (if this is even allowed at all): it's just not worth my time.

The whole "we keep a copy in a central archive" approach only works for historical purposes, not for actually making it available for reading. If you do that you have to also make digital scans trivially available for browsing - and in practice that rarely happens!

by crote

6/12/2026 at 8:32:42 PM

Whenever I am attending university, or live near one, I try to walk every aisle and every shelf at least once per year. Maybe things are much better these days, but all too often I would find books that were not in the card catalog (or cataloged incorrectly). The "adjacent shelf" method of research was one secret that grad students tended to learn.

by Tangurena2

6/12/2026 at 7:20:14 PM

You're browsing for whatever piques your interest, and the library wants to curate the collection based on what people are interested in. The books that collect interest get placed on the shelves and the ones that don't get archived. If it's in the archive it probably wouldn't have interested you.

by Cycl0ps

6/13/2026 at 12:29:10 AM

You say that but the author mentioned On Grammatology getting purged. That's a pretty important and influential book. It's a very difficult read which probably contributes to it not being checked out very often and it should definitely stay there.

by sapphicsnail

6/12/2026 at 6:23:32 PM

Expecting libraries to maintain digital scans of every book they have had or anything to that effect is a little laughable. These organizations do more for communities with less money and you expect them do now navigate the legal and ethical quagmire of digital ownership because you can't handle knowledge and books becoming less valuable with time.

If you are a software dev, go volunteer at a library and offer up your time to do this. Do something for your community, do something for yourself.

by elictronic

6/12/2026 at 7:32:33 PM

> If you are a software dev, go volunteer at a library and offer up your time to do this.

You misunderstand the environment, "offering" doesn't work if the library haven't asked for help, in that case you're just ignored. You see, whatever you do for them would require participation and at least some effort on their side.

Some other organization could help here, but going to the library and begging them to let you help them is a non starter.

by bigbadfeline

6/12/2026 at 10:27:50 PM

Public libraries are public institutions and are controlled by towns and counties, in a few different common ways. To affect change in the town or county's library, you can participate in that process.

by Blackthorn

6/12/2026 at 5:01:26 PM

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.

This is hardly comparable to difficult philosophy books as mentioned in the article, though. To my mind, the poin of libraries is to house and make accessible difficult or challenging books that might not necessarily be popular. I was shocked when I first visited an American library and found large numbers of mass-market paperbacks and magazines. When I say 'large numbers' I mean 10 or 20 copies of books by Oprah or other celebrity authors. Librarians would have it that they're serving the community by making these books available in the library around the same time they're available in bookstores, ignoring the fact that once the publisher's marketing drive is over all those extra copies are going to be surplus. I do not understand why you would buy 20 copies of one book when you could have it and 19 other books.

by anigbrowl

6/12/2026 at 8:13:06 PM

My local library wasn't meant for academics, but the problem is exactly the same. In fact, I'd expect a library with those kinds of books to be more amenable to trimming the collection: you often don't have a romance novel in mind, you browse for one that piques your interest. I'd be surprised if anyone was actively browsing shelves for philosophy books that seemed fun. That's the sort of stuff you go to the card catalog for.

> I do not understand why you would buy 20 copies of one book when you could have it and 19 other books.

Easy answer. Libraries know what their clients will check out. Often, because books are requested. If fifty people wait-listed the last big Dan Brown book, the library buys enough so that those people aren't waiting months to get their turn.

And yes, it's frustrating for librarians. Nobody likes buying lots of books that are not especially good. But that's literally the whole point of the library. Providing access to books that people actually want to read.

by bastawhiz

6/12/2026 at 10:45:16 PM

That actually is not at all why most American libraries were founded. They were very explicit about this and it was not so people would have fun books to read.

If we needed public entertainment centers, then let's be clear what they are and advertise them as such. Personally I have no interest in the public funding of entertainment.

by Amezarak

6/12/2026 at 11:39:17 PM

[dead]

by bombcar

6/12/2026 at 5:11:06 PM

Probably because there is demand. Could be that there was very deep waiting list at some point. Or there has been deep waiting list for specific author before. Fulfilling these demands does require multiple copies or it could take years for people to get popular book.

by Ekaros

6/12/2026 at 5:28:25 PM

Sorry, I don't think popularity should be a factor in library decision-making. Extremely popular books driven by massive marketing campaigns predictably translate into the same book being available for only a few dollars months later. This all sounds like it's driven much more by the needs of publishers than library users; consider that the more reduced the selection, the fewer people will come to use the library because they can't find enough interesting material to read.

My local Half-Price Books (a second-hand bookstore chain) has a vastly better selection than my local library.

by anigbrowl

6/12/2026 at 6:17:02 PM

This is a great way to lose what's left of public support for libraries. Going (more?) elitist is really not the way to go here. Your average person should be able to find utility in a library.

University libraries of course might be a good exception to this rule. But your local public library should be a way to make reading accessible to the average middle to lower class family. And that means providing the materials they want to read - not what you think they should.

It's always going to be a balance for librarians. They don't get to operate in ivory towers disconnected from those local taxpayers whom fund them.

by phil21

6/13/2026 at 1:09:39 AM

Utility is in having a big selection of books. If a large chunk of the library is just multiple copies of previously popular books, then you are cutting people off from discover the range of books that are available. I would never have found authors like Stanislaw Lem or or Robert Heinlein as a teenager if it hadn't been for the library; the science fiction sections in bookstores at the time were clogged with movie adaptation novellas and mostly forgettable trilogies/franchise works.

As a library-funding taxpayer myself, I find it very depressing that the selection in my local libraries is so lacking. Hence my remark about the vast superiority of second-hand bookstores for just about any topic.

by anigbrowl

6/13/2026 at 12:35:26 AM

> But your local public library should be a way to make reading accessible to the average middle to lower class family. And that means providing the materials they want to read - not what you think they should.

It's pretty classicist to assume that only rich people are reading those kinds of books. I have plenty of friends who struggle to pay rent who read dense stuff like philosophy, lit. theory, etc. This whole David Brooks style paternalism drives me crazy.

by sapphicsnail

6/12/2026 at 10:49:32 PM

> This is a great way to lose what's left of public support for libraries. Going (more?) elitist is really not the way to go here.

Why should I support a public entertainment center? The original American libraries were created to make valuable and educational works accessible to the public, not pulp. Library systems all over the country have discarded most of this stuff in favor of political, romance, mysteries and kids books. Abandoning their original mission is exactly why their public support has collapsed. Nobody cares about a place for homeless people to browse the Internet or to check out video games and movies.

> But your local public library should be a way to make reading accessible to the average middle to lower class family.

"Reading" is already maximally accessible, nobody needs a library to do this. Kids are reading reams and reams of web fiction. If anything, the increasingly low quality of library fare is related to the poor reading level of Americans generally - children's books have become especially atrocious, but even pulp mystery fiction is written on a very low reading level. “We have to get them to READ” is a completely pointless and meaningless goal if the public benefit is to keep up romance fiction publisher profits.

by Amezarak

6/13/2026 at 1:30:23 AM

Speaking of children's books being atrocious, more and more people are turning up examples of AI-generated books in libraries. I know Librarians aim to screen out this sort of stuff but they seem to be missing the mark. Part of the problem is that some publishers appear to mix AI stuff into their catalogs and some libraries are just buying based on the cover and summary text.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1rnjx1e/i_found_thi...

https://www.governing.com/artificial-intelligence/how-local-...

by anigbrowl

6/12/2026 at 9:16:32 PM

Yours seems to be an unpopular opinion. Perhaps you could partner with Bertrand Russell: <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13524206M/Unpopular_essays>.

I'm also reminded by an observation of the late Robert K. Merton, on latent vs. manifest functions. Originally coined in the context of sociology, but far more broadly applicable. In discussing these, Merton makes the perceptive observation that because latent functions are not immediately apparent, obvious, or significant, they represent a greater increment of knowledge and understanding than manifest functions, which are obvious, evident, easily understood and communicated, etc.

Popular works, or opinions, tend to be more accessible, yes. But they are also frequently a lower increment of knowledge or utility.

I too am pained by book and other information collections which pander to easy accessibility at a cost to insight and significance. That isn't to say that libraries should discount popularity at all, but I cringe when it seems to be the primary consideration.

By extension, other mass-context systems (markets, mass media, etc.) also tend toward minimum viable standards (often mis-stated as "least common denominator", problematic in several ways), and discount both long-term (non-obvious, non-apparent) benefits and costs.

by dredmorbius

6/12/2026 at 7:34:01 PM

> I don't think popularity should be a factor in library decision-making.

How dare librarians... give the people the books they want to read???

by jubilanti

6/13/2026 at 1:35:10 AM

Well, I should have said the overriding factor, but my reasoning is that a lot of what appears to be 'popularity' is just the result of marketing campaigns by publishers, as opposed to the sort of enduring popularity that comes from being loved by readers (which can't be determined until some time after a book's release).

That said, I would still prioritize variety over pure popularity. For example, I can see a library having 2 or 3 copies of all the Harry Potter books because people keep checking them out, but I don't think they need 10 copies.

by anigbrowl

6/13/2026 at 4:36:14 PM

And your sense of what books are truly quality is in no way impacted by "marketing" to you? Let me guess, are you one of those people who thinks that ads work on other people, but not them?

Your idea of what makes a book good or bad is as much influenced by the marketing you are exposed to. You're just subjected to a different kind of marketing than the general public.

by jubilanti

6/13/2026 at 1:18:56 PM

It’s very simple: Because people go to the library looking for those books. If the library consistently doesn’t have the books people went there for, they stop going. If people stop going to the library, it eventually gets shut down.

by ungreased0675

6/12/2026 at 5:43:30 PM

The point of libraries is to help people access the books they want. If someone wants Oprah's book then why should the library not help them access it? If a lot of people want it, then why should the library not stock many copies so that more those people can access it? They don't exist to gatekeep books and ensure people read whatever you think are the right kind of books.

by wat10000

6/12/2026 at 6:52:05 PM

I have a bit of a problem with the all or nothing framing this discourse usually has. I think that libraries should make an effort to stock evergreen classics in addition to the recent, hot, and in demand. The new ones will be checked out a lot, then fall off, and then the library eventually gets a new batch of new hits.

They do serve a lot of people with this method, but am a different cohort. If a library is to serve a diverse group of people it should also remember book snobs like me. When I visit my local library it is as if anything remotely classic is hidden in a secret area, you can’t find hardly any of them.

by bashmelek

6/12/2026 at 11:41:29 PM

The libraries actually do this, even if it’s not entirely visible or advertised- most librarians are rabid book-lovers and would love nothing more than to stock great books and similar.

They just provide cover with the DVDs and the pulp.

by bombcar

6/12/2026 at 7:01:33 PM

I totally agree. People who want evergreen classics count too, and the library should do its best to ensure they can get the books they want as well. They shouldn't stock nothing but bestsellers, any more than they should stock no bestsellers at all.

by wat10000

6/12/2026 at 7:26:43 PM

And, with the Internet (e.g. Gutenberg), evergreen classics are less of an issue. Speaking for myself, I've gotten rid of most of my books in the public domain unless they have other characteristics like illustrations that make me want to hold onto them.

by ghaff

6/13/2026 at 1:43:48 AM

If a lot of people want it, it will be widely available through other channels. If you buy too many copies, you end up with what we see in many libraries, multiple copies of last/previous years' flavors-of-the-month that nobody cares about any more. Great for publishers who want to maximize library sales at $80/unit, not so great for readers who want a wider selections of books to choose from.

by anigbrowl

6/12/2026 at 4:48:42 PM

That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine which one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving such books around on request does not exceed that of storage.

Given the number of books I've been unable to find when I wanted them save in the Library of Congress (which won't loan, necessitating a trip to DC, or finding and purchasing my own copy), and the number of times my ILL requests have been turned down, a last copy per system mechanism seems the best for preserving access.

by WillAdams

6/12/2026 at 5:19:23 PM

> That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine which one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving such books around on request does not exceed that of storage.

Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and NYPL coordinate on exactly this https://recap.princeton.edu/

by rdmond

6/12/2026 at 8:16:53 PM

> That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine which one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving such books around on request does not exceed that of storage.

This is actually a mostly-solved problem in many cases. Many librarians have great SQL skills (or at least the ones I've met) and can query this easily. Most regional library systems have a centralized catalog. And the cost of moving books on demand is fixed: a van with one book and a van with fifty books costs the same to drive between branches.

Most colleges and universities have agreements with each other for exactly these systems and they're actively used. My partner considered completing his U Chicago PhD from San Francisco by way of the Stanford library.

by bastawhiz

6/13/2026 at 11:57:06 AM

You need to move those skills and agreements down to the smaller regional level.

There have been numerous cases where I checked out a book, and later went to refer to it again and it was not just no longer in the stacks, but not available in the system.

by WillAdams

6/13/2026 at 9:53:44 PM

What books are you curious for that you're unable to find? I'm really curious about this as I, an avid horror book reader, have never had significant trouble even when buying very niche/indie work.

by KittenInABox

6/14/2026 at 2:51:03 AM

Texts on typography, history, and folklore for various research efforts.

It's not that I can't find them, it's that a couple were available locally, but aren't currently (due to being discarded) and the nearest copies are in the Library of Congress (which does not lend), requiring a drive. Mostly I've been buying them.

by WillAdams

6/12/2026 at 4:49:30 PM

I fear that the availability of e-books will lead to more libraries getting rid of their last copy, not just the penultimate one.

by kzrdude

6/12/2026 at 8:09:10 PM

It seems like they just don't really plan inventory in a logical way but in a sort of rigid first in first out way. For example I just checked out a recent addition of a classical book, one of those original classical translations that were reprinted in the 2010s with some new forward I will skip over as the only thing different than the 1990 edition, or the 1960 edition for that matter.

The library had probably 30 copies of this edition, most all sitting on shelves, while maybe 1 or 2 each of all other older editions. I'm guessing solely because this edition is "new" therefore they ordered a case of these books from the publisher when they came out whether there was demand for it or not, and the quantities of the older editions are much more likely to be matched to true demand of this book.

And eventually, they will have to destroy what probably 29 copies of this book in some years time.

Seems kind of stupid right? Why order such an excess of books?

Then I also wonder if they could sunset these quantities better. Rather than destroy the excess copy after I return it, maybe just let me keep it?

by asdff

6/12/2026 at 11:40:35 PM

> Rather than destroy the excess copy after I return it, maybe just let me keep it?

This is pretty much what they do with children’s board books. Toddlers pretty much wreck any book you give them. But the library wants kids to learn to read. So they check them out and then they accept them back in whatever condition, no fees.

by throwaway173738

6/13/2026 at 8:05:26 PM

Eventually they will throw out the book though right? This is what I am getting at. Rather than throw out the book, give the last person who is getting to use it the option to keep it. Saves on incineration costs and hey maybe some would appreciate a book in whatever condition it is in.

by asdff

6/12/2026 at 9:58:20 PM

"If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days"

That means two trips to the library. And it means you can't use the book that same day. This is fine for fiction, but not if you want a book because you're going to study it to aid your learning or your work.

If it's fine for a book to arrive in a few days why have a library with publicly browsable shelves at all?

by rahimnathwani

6/13/2026 at 3:40:27 AM

I live in Seattle and we have a fairly large library system.

They have none of the fraggle rock books. A once huge series, now gone.

Same for the Mr Men series. Just may as well not exist.

My son very much enjoys my old fraggle rock books, but my library system apparently threw all of their copies away years ago.

by com2kid

6/13/2026 at 4:10:34 AM

Do you keep track of what was deaccessioned and compare that against ILL requests? Otherwise how would you know, unless you happen to remember all the books that have been disposed of?

by goldfishgold

6/12/2026 at 6:50:25 PM

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

I've done ILL in three major cities. The shortest time it took to get the books requested was 14 days. Some have taken over 60.

by reaperducer

6/12/2026 at 11:44:19 PM

There’s different levels of interlibrary loan - around here all the little local libraries can loan from each other in a matter of days (they ship to a central location each day). But they can also pull from a much wider distribution via media mail if needed.

by bombcar

6/12/2026 at 8:18:15 PM

You can request a book from another library that's already checked out in some cases, which means you have to wait for it to be returned first. In my experience, a week is usually the norm.

by bastawhiz

6/12/2026 at 7:29:25 PM

That seems like a very reasonable timeframe for a physical book. Certainly used to take longer than that to special-order something.

by ghaff

6/12/2026 at 9:27:35 PM

In 1897 the US Library of Congress moved off-site from the Capitol building to an adjacent property. A key concern of its patronage (Congress itself) was how long it would take to retrieve books from this remote location.

The annual Librarian's letter details the results: an unannounced test of five arbitrarily-selected works was made via pneumatic tube (later supplemented with a telephone), and the requested works arrived within 10m5s, 8m11s, 10m, and with the longest delay, 12 minutes from receipt of the request.

See p. 7 of the annual Librarian's Report: <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735044&vi...>.

One would hope that 2026 technolgies would be capable of results within at least the same order of magnitude, even at a greater physical separation.

One of my tremendous disappointments of today's Internet is the haste with which it delivers drek, but the reluctance with which it provides useful information, often for utterly outdated concerns with copyright. I'll note that HathiTrust itself, here the source of what was originally a public-domain US government publication, well outside any possible extant of copyright, still only permits one-page-at-a-time downloading of the original document.

by dredmorbius

6/12/2026 at 5:14:57 PM

I was walking down the street, and I saw a art/documentary style picture of a book seller, wearing a Fez, it seemed interesting, so I took a picture of it, and later fawned on it... until I realized that his books were on display, so I rotated the picture, and scanned the titles. There were three Greek tarot decks, which were interesting, and a book, that was about an old technology. I went to the library to see where I could check it out. No were in the city library, no where in the State University or State colleges, no where in the county collection... and then the librarian/Super-genius, suggested scanning the local library database, and found the book, in a small library, in the far corner of the state, and I filled out a form to request a two week loan... but two days to get here, and two days return, I would have the book for 10 solid days.

When I got it, I read through it, solid for three days. Wow. Stunning look at a technology in its infancy.

The name of the Bookseller was Luma Kunda. Thank you Mr Kunda. I later learned from someone at the nearby bus stop, that Mr Kunda possessed an eidetic memory.

I would have loved to hear him tell stories about what he saw in the tarot cards.

by ForOldHack

6/12/2026 at 8:13:33 PM

You could have renewed that book though right? I haven't actually ever done an interlibrary loan but for "in network" books seems I can continue renewing them indefinitely until the end of time.

by asdff

6/12/2026 at 5:25:14 PM

If you have a list of ISBNs (in a github gist, pastebin, or similar), I am happy to purchase any the Internet Archive does not yet have in their collection for long term preservation and eventual lending. Thank you for sharing.

by toomuchtodo

6/12/2026 at 8:58:09 PM

I think librarians tend to become creatures-that-shovel-books. Librarians come to think of books as this sort of continuum, an ooze that they just pipe from one stack to another. Housing the books and following the proper procedures becomes the important thing, not the words on the pages.

But that's completely the wrong attitude. Books are NOT all created equal. A schlocky romance novel is not equivalent to a book by Kierkegaard, or Vonnegut, or Plath, despite the fact that they are just a bunch of leaves between bindings with an ISBN stamped on the back.

So it's telling when the top comment on a story about professors fighting to save books from being carelessly thrown away is that there exists a basement full of romance novels. The narrator is faulty in this story.

by phendrenad2

6/12/2026 at 5:56:02 PM

>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.

These libraries do not coordinate the deaccessioning. If it ever gets down to 2 copies, there's a non-zero chance that they will deaccession their copies simultaneously, and then there are none.

You worked for a library. Did they ever check first to make sure some other library had a copy? Did they warn that other library "we're getting rid of ours, please don't get rid of yours"?

by NoMoreNicksLeft

6/12/2026 at 6:53:00 PM

You’re so wrong.

‘“I think some faculty worry that everyone is going to discard willy nilly and then before you know it there won’t be anything left,” Walker said. “No, libraries have gotten together, research libraries and others, and joined a consortium called LOCKSS – Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe – and people have agreements like Harvard is the place that will always keep a print copy of x. And there’s multiple ones of all of it. So there’s backup in case Harvard gets blown away by a nor’easter or something.”’

https://dakotastudent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Apr-10....

by ciscoriordan

6/12/2026 at 8:19:17 PM

> Did they ever check first to make sure some other library had a copy? Did they warn that other library "we're getting rid of ours, please don't get rid of yours"?

Yes. They have a shared catalog. All of this is coordinated. It's literally the whole point of being a librarian.

by bastawhiz

6/12/2026 at 10:31:18 PM

>They have a shared catalog.

Yes. I have my nose in it constantly. It's a fallacy to ascribe more coordination to this than actually exists. What mechanism is it that you think exists that would sound the red alert when the last library (or even the second to last) is about to get rid of the very last copy?

by NoMoreNicksLeft

6/12/2026 at 11:46:00 PM

> What mechanism is it that you think exists that would sound the red alert when the last library (or even the second to last) is about to get rid of the very last copy?

Doesn't need much coordination. Before getting rid of a book, search for it in that shared catalog you allegedly have your nose in constantly. If you're the last or second to last copy, then you know. Unless two libraries are independently doing this at the exact same time.

by jubilanti

6/12/2026 at 5:15:04 PM

this sounds a bit different than a university library situation

by timcobb

6/12/2026 at 4:44:39 PM

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

by gammalost

6/12/2026 at 4:49:13 PM

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.

by ciscoriordan

6/12/2026 at 5:03:55 PM

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/

by varun_ch

6/13/2026 at 1:34:59 PM

While this is a fantastic service for interior decorators, I find the concept of using books as just decorations grotesque.

by ungreased0675

6/12/2026 at 8:16:50 PM

Reversed is so crazy.

by asdff

6/12/2026 at 6:33:52 PM

Straight out of Gatsby:

A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real — have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and — Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

by aaronharnly

6/12/2026 at 5:06:51 PM

What is even a fake book? Like it has a nice cover and nothing inside?

by el_io

6/12/2026 at 6:44:35 PM

Yep, think movie props or fake computer or books in an IKEA or other furniture store. Maybe a whole shelf with a cardboard structure simulating the spines of a bunch of books, but all empty inside.

by tecleandor

6/12/2026 at 7:30:06 PM

Small nitpick but the books in IKEA are all real, and written in Swedish :).

by littlekey

6/12/2026 at 5:40:31 PM

Exactly. Basically a cardboard shell with realistic covers.

by ciscoriordan

6/12/2026 at 8:13:20 PM

I'd like to believe that real books would get swapped more often than stolen.

by mjmsmith

6/12/2026 at 7:36:17 PM

I think that’s a relatively fair take. Personally I prefer ebooks or audiobooks mostly because I can put thousands in my pocket/e-reader and carry it with me and I prefer the experience of reading a book on my reader over paper.

For me, books are closer to art than functional objects. I have a wall of bookshelves in my house that I love and I’m slowly filling them with my favorite books. I will probably never reread any of them (I’ll read the ebook version instead) but I like looking at them and I like being able to loan them out or for them to be a conversation starter.

It took me a while to be ok with that (treating books as art) but I’ve made my peace with it. I’m buy 99% used books from places like AbeBooks online or Half Price Books locally and I have no interest in “books by the foot” or similar. It’s more like my bookshelves are mini-shrines to authors or series that have been impactful to me.

by joshstrange

6/13/2026 at 2:42:11 PM

It’s either that, or an extreme conservatism where nothing must deviate from how it used to be.

by clickety_clack

6/12/2026 at 4:55:38 PM

I don't know whether to call it fetishism, which has a negative undertone to me.

But I do love physical books. Even unimposing books, I like reading them but also touching them, their smell, their covers. And for art books, I think it goes without saying that the experience of the digital version is markedly different to the physical version.

I love going to a used books store and simply perusing their shelves, occasionally buying something, and a digital library simply cannot replicate this.

by the_af

6/12/2026 at 6:03:43 PM

For how many thousands of years were books equivalent to absurd wealth. Kings might own a book, or several. Libraries were amazing, but places never seen by the proles and serfs. Thousands of years is a duration more than long enough to give our species some instinctual reverence for the object, reverence that is only reinforced by what we learn from an early age about those. And it's not just the wealth, at least for some sizable fraction of the population, we come to know books as things of knowledge and power, so slurring them as mere commodities is low-handed.

Books are, I think, in some small way, sacred. And I don't want to associate with people who think otherwise. I don't think you get it at all.

by NoMoreNicksLeft

6/12/2026 at 11:51:22 PM

Then you apparently do not want to associate with the vast majority of professional librarians, who do not fetishize every individual physical instantiation of the printed word.

Some books are sacred. But if they all are, then none of them really are.

by jubilanti

6/12/2026 at 4:21:32 PM

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.

by SMV279438

6/12/2026 at 4:48:04 PM

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.

by andrewla

6/12/2026 at 8:15:12 PM

Never too late to go back and start up a physical library.

by asdff

6/12/2026 at 9:55:32 PM

I had the experience at uni in the 1980s of seeing the film The Last Emperor, which at one point includes a bit where a Time Magazine photographer is present. I realised that this probably meant that Time had run an item on the (then newly-crowned Japanese puppet) emperor Puyi of Manchukuo (occupied China).

So I headed to the campus library, serials room, which had bound volumes of Time along with many other publications, and shelf-scanned the appropriate date ranges around 1934 until I found the edition with the story. Read that, which was insightful (a question I'd had was whether or not Puyi was seen at the time as a puppet, and yes, he very much was).

I am fearful that this experience could not be replicated today, and that those stacks may well have been cleared.

by dredmorbius

6/12/2026 at 4:34:03 PM

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.

by Walf

6/12/2026 at 7:34:53 PM

I agree to some degree. But I'd also note that some of the biggest libraries don't have open stacks.

by ghaff

6/12/2026 at 6:38:35 PM

Years ago I did an exploratory UX spike, an attempt to make history more tangible, by giving each day a dot (so a couple of centuries fit on a screen), with the dots providing, among other things, scans of that day's newspapers and magazines. Nice for browsing/surfing history. Part of not pursuing it further, was newspapers - and historically there were many many more newspapers per region, let alone per person - newspapers were already mostly paywalled, and becoming less available with time. Even libraries which did their own scanning of archived local papers, would grow tired of support, and turn them over for paywalling. My understanding was there was little money in it, but all it takes is enough to scatter moats everywhere, to make a terrain inaccessible to broad access.

by mncharity

6/13/2026 at 4:14:30 AM

Utah Valley University?

by goldfishgold

6/12/2026 at 4:43:58 PM

> 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.

by kristjansson

6/12/2026 at 7:38:17 PM

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.

by ghaff

6/12/2026 at 11:11:43 PM

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).

by kristjansson

6/12/2026 at 8:52:44 PM

Yep, also meeting rooms for various clubs. My university genuinely had a wine tasting club that met in the library.

by nitwit005

6/12/2026 at 3:38:01 PM

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-librar...

by ciscoriordan

6/12/2026 at 3:43:59 PM

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.

by TFNA

6/12/2026 at 3:47:31 PM

You're confusing the other library in the article with the (unnamed) one mentioned in the title, the Chester Fritz Library.

by ciscoriordan

6/12/2026 at 5:09:19 PM

> 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.

by michaelt

6/12/2026 at 9:12:10 PM

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.

by jswelker

6/12/2026 at 4:45:13 PM

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/

by andrewla

6/12/2026 at 5:03:04 PM

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.

by ForOldHack

6/12/2026 at 6:51:30 PM

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.

by andrewla

6/12/2026 at 5:05:17 PM

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...

by jjkaczor

6/12/2026 at 6:12:50 PM

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.

by NoMoreNicksLeft

6/12/2026 at 6:32:35 PM

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...

by jjkaczor

6/12/2026 at 5:57:35 PM

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.

by arjie

6/12/2026 at 4:59:47 PM

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.

by hcayless

6/12/2026 at 6:54:18 PM

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.

by roughly

6/12/2026 at 10:34:29 PM

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

by FiatLuxDave

6/12/2026 at 10:17:17 PM

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.

by rmason

6/12/2026 at 5:20:23 PM

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

by CalChris

6/12/2026 at 3:32:01 PM

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.

by TFNA

6/12/2026 at 4:34:35 PM

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.

by beej71

6/12/2026 at 3:51:00 PM

any system with pages you "turn" certainly feels very different to reading a webpage (or PDF) with free vertical scrolling

by crtasm

6/13/2026 at 2:30:44 AM

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

by etempleton

6/12/2026 at 5:03:30 PM

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.

by sailfast

6/12/2026 at 5:25:32 PM

- 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.

by ceayo

6/12/2026 at 6:01:18 PM

No one is stopping you from building your own library.

by gowld

6/12/2026 at 8:20:23 PM

> What’s wrong with e-books?

This article is about academic libraries. Research in many fields requires keeping multiple books open in front of you at the same time, because new research typically starts by synthesizing disparate previous research. That’s a workflow that most people find much less efficient with ebooks. Your segue into personal book ownership and impressing people is also not very relevant to the article.

by TFNA

6/13/2026 at 12:21:59 AM

Do you actually own "your" ebooks?

From experience, when a college library offers access to an ebook, what they do is just providing an access token so you can log into some publisher's website and read it there. The publisher can theoretically withdraw a book or raise the price and the library will have no recourse because it doesn't own them.

by pibaker

6/12/2026 at 5:45:40 PM

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.

by toomuchtodo

6/12/2026 at 9:42:49 PM

DRM wouldn’t be a problem if it were unambiguously legal to break it and if copyright durations weren’t so ridiculously long. I have free and legal access to all the ebooks I could ever want from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and so on, except for that last 95‐year chunk. There needs to be an appetite for copyright reform to extend and make permanent DMCA exemptions and to reduce copyright terms.

by bentley

6/12/2026 at 6:14:57 PM

>>What’s wrong with e-books?

>DRM

You're downloading them wrong.

by NoMoreNicksLeft

6/12/2026 at 6:03:13 PM

> 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.

by gowld

6/12/2026 at 6:52:36 PM

Please provide a citation supporting this assertion.

by toomuchtodo

6/12/2026 at 5:08:04 PM

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.

by hedora

6/12/2026 at 5:23:09 PM

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.

by zamadatix

6/12/2026 at 7:03:59 PM

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

by warumdarum

6/12/2026 at 5:03:42 PM

> 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.

by deaux

6/12/2026 at 5:14:32 PM

So if you want them just dumpster dive for them.

by j_w

6/13/2026 at 3:22:37 AM

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.

by giardini

6/12/2026 at 8:47:43 PM

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.

by tokai

6/12/2026 at 6:38:52 PM

Rainbows End

by apitman

6/12/2026 at 4:56:23 PM

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.

by anigbrowl

6/12/2026 at 6:26:52 PM

Why do those "other people" get a free pass to be "in love with the power of administration"?

by gowld

6/13/2026 at 1:45:05 AM

In academic libraries, because they are experts in their field.

by anigbrowl

6/13/2026 at 10:10:00 PM

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.

by k310

6/12/2026 at 4:18:17 PM

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

by roysting

6/13/2026 at 2:55:29 PM

The Minions of the Ministry clearly do not approve.

by roysting

6/12/2026 at 4:20:34 PM

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

by LaGrange

6/12/2026 at 5:27:19 PM

Without books, what books are they going to read?

by ceayo

6/12/2026 at 5:39:02 PM

E-books supposedly, since the parent explicitly specified paper books.

by SauntSolaire

6/12/2026 at 9:31:15 PM

Other books that are checked out often enough to justify the library keeping them.

by bentley

6/13/2026 at 2:11:00 PM

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.

by LaGrange

6/12/2026 at 4:03:18 PM

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

by WillAdams