Eliminating old books
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After eliminating valueless textbooks after graduating college, I made it a point to NOT buy technical books. Other folks may go to an extreme -- one guy I worked with had a bookcase 8' tall and 12' wide, literally overflowing with technical books. Each time he touched a new technology, he purchased at least 3 new books. When he moved offices, it took him 2 days to move all the books. Having spent 25+ years as a consultant/contractor, when I needed technical books, I talked the client into buying them. The same conversation was conducted repeatedly with each client: "You know you can't keep the books when your contract ends?" Yeah, that was actually the idea. I had no idea what the future would bring in terms of technology I would work with, so I'd talk the next client into buying what I need for that contract. Saved me money AND I didn't have to move the books. When I went into a client site for the first time, I carried my briefcase and one bag of "stuff", and when I left, I did the same. That said, this morning I looked at the bookcase in my home office and wondered what I'd do with the few books I purchased that are LONG outdated. Keeping with my "don't buy" mantra, there's only 5: Microsoft C Programming for the PC XML for Dummies Learn ASP.NET in 21 Days (probably v1) Professional C# 2008 Professional WordPress (probably v2) Is there any value in books this old? WordPress is probably 12 yo and it's the youngest. ASP and XML are circa 2000, and C is circa 1990. I hate to toss them in the landfill but can't figure out a use for them.
I donate all my old books to my local city library branch. They even have a drive-by deposit box. What they do with them is part of their job. I have actual seen some of my old books on their shelves inside the public part of the main library.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day" Badfinger
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After eliminating valueless textbooks after graduating college, I made it a point to NOT buy technical books. Other folks may go to an extreme -- one guy I worked with had a bookcase 8' tall and 12' wide, literally overflowing with technical books. Each time he touched a new technology, he purchased at least 3 new books. When he moved offices, it took him 2 days to move all the books. Having spent 25+ years as a consultant/contractor, when I needed technical books, I talked the client into buying them. The same conversation was conducted repeatedly with each client: "You know you can't keep the books when your contract ends?" Yeah, that was actually the idea. I had no idea what the future would bring in terms of technology I would work with, so I'd talk the next client into buying what I need for that contract. Saved me money AND I didn't have to move the books. When I went into a client site for the first time, I carried my briefcase and one bag of "stuff", and when I left, I did the same. That said, this morning I looked at the bookcase in my home office and wondered what I'd do with the few books I purchased that are LONG outdated. Keeping with my "don't buy" mantra, there's only 5: Microsoft C Programming for the PC XML for Dummies Learn ASP.NET in 21 Days (probably v1) Professional C# 2008 Professional WordPress (probably v2) Is there any value in books this old? WordPress is probably 12 yo and it's the youngest. ASP and XML are circa 2000, and C is circa 1990. I hate to toss them in the landfill but can't figure out a use for them.
You could donate them to your local community theatre (if you have one) as props.
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They are great for target practice. My in-laws would shoot various guns on Thanksgiving day -- mostly we shot clay pigeons (20 gauge and 12 gauge) but they would also haul out other guns - .44 handgun, other various rifles etc. But often they would say, "well, let's just shoot at that twig down there about 30 yards" It was terribly un-fun that way. I started taking my old tech books and place 4 or 5 in front of each other. That was a blast (literally) as you could track the bullet through the pages of the book. So cool! Great Science I remember they were shooting a hollow point out of the .44 pistol and the bullet hole was perfectly round on entry and halfway through an 800 page tech book but then somehwere around page 400 or so the bullet mis-formed and ripped a huge hole through the rest of the book. So, use your old tech books for target practice.
It's a shame I threw out all of the mechanical engineering textbooks from college. Even though I was a computer engineering major, I still had to take statics, dynamics, strength of materials, thermodynamics, and electromagnetics. They made up about 15% of the credit hours for my degree and have been utterly useless. Those books would have made profoundly satisfying targets.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
dandy72 wrote:
They wouldn't take anything older than 5 years. Yet these are the same people who are constantly complaining they're underfunded. They weren't junk, and I'm sure if I had bothered I might have found some buyers, even if only for historical value.
Err...except you just stated that some of them you had never read and that you would never use them again. Libraries of course must either store books or dispose of them. Which costs money. You know the part where funding comes in. And computing has impacted them as well. So they can easily track titles and genres which people do read and those that they don't. So they maximize the potential.
jschell wrote:
except you just stated that some of them you had never read and that you would never use them again.
Which doesn't make them valueless. In that particular case *I* just wasn't the target audience. I just wanted to salvage this brand new set of 6 or 7 volumes, headed for the dumpster, still shrink-wrapped together. Very technical, very expensive, but I just never went in that direction.
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Thanks for the recommendation. While I cannot see any value in these books, someone might.
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I have zero nostalgia with paper books, especially technical books. (with some exceptions) I moved houses too many times with too many cases of books. I've recycled most of them and gave a few. I still have a small bookshelf with 2 dozen dusty books.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
I've lived in the same house for 30 years ... the thought of moving my paperback books is daunting! While I don't buy technical books, up until about 10 years ago, I purchased a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books.
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BryanFazekas wrote:
I'd talk the next client into buying what I need for that contract.
I know a guy who does house renovations for a living. If there's an unusual tool he doesn't already have but needs for a job, he buys it and keeps it (or rents it for the duration needed if he knows he's never gonna use it ever again, or so rarely he can't justify the purchase). He doesn't make the customer buy it and then hand it over when the job's done. The customer has no need for the tool. Things might be different in the software world; if you need a license to use some software, and the customer needs to run that software, this makes sense...but books? Even though you hand it to the customer after the job's done, you don't wipe out from your mind what you've learned from the book. You're the main beneficiary. And the customer (in all likelihood) also has no need for the book. But, I've never done any contracting...maybe I'd change my mind if I was, or was working on stuff I have zero interest in after the job was done. Otherwise, I'd buy, and keep. In any case...I did get rid (last year or so) of a big pile of books, maybe 5 feet high if I had stacked them all. Clearly some stuff I'll never use again. Although the hoarder archivist in me kinda regrets throwing away at least some of them. Some were brand new (clearly I got by without reading them...) I just never had a "proper" bookshelf and the books were just taking up place in a number of boxes on the floor of a closet. Otherwise I probably would've hung onto a few of them (some I was happy to be rid of). What annoyed me the most is that I had checked with my local library to see if they'd take them, rather than sending them for recycling (which I know in some cases still end up in a landfill anyway). They wouldn't take anything older than 5 years. Yet these are the same people who are constantly complaining they're underfunded. They weren't junk, and I'm sure if I had bothered I might have found some buyers, even if only for historical value.
dandy72 wrote:
Things might be different in the software world; if you need a license to use some software, and the customer needs to run that software, this makes sense...but books? Even though you hand it to the customer after the job's done, you don't wipe out from your mind what you've learned from the book. You're the main beneficiary. And the customer (in all likelihood) also has no need for the book.
You have that backwards. In the situations I mentioned, the client had need for the books after I left, while I didn't. Especially in the 90's, it was common for me to do a 3, 6, 9, or 12 month contract that used technologies I was not familiar with. This is unlike today when customers expect 5 to 10 years of experience in a technology that's been on the market 3 months. The list of technologies I used once on one contract is a lonnnggg one ... so I had no need to keep the books. OTOH, the customer had an ongoing investment in specific technologies, so they did need the books. Mostly to train new people who had no familiarity with the technologies.
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Over the last several years I have thinned my herd of technical books quite a bit. Here at work I have about 18 inches of shelf. At home it's about half a dozen volumes, a couple of college textbooks from 40 years ago plus some 'work' technical stuff. I recently dumped a couple boxes of technical books I had stored at home. MS-DOS references, internals, and undocumented stuff. I used a lot of this back in the 90's at work.
Software Zen:
delete this;This is a wide tangent, but I recently went through CDs and DVDs, and dumped at least 50. I had backups from ancient projects, installers from products I'd never use again (like VS 2008), etc.
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This is a wide tangent, but I recently went through CDs and DVDs, and dumped at least 50. I had backups from ancient projects, installers from products I'd never use again (like VS 2008), etc.
You'd lose it if you saw our archives at work, stored in a lab. We have somewhere around 8,000 CD and DVD discs backing up product builds. The last couple of years backups are written to Flash drives, since most of our product builds are larger than a couple DVD's. We have one that's 25GB :omg: .
Software Zen:
delete this; -
They are great for target practice. My in-laws would shoot various guns on Thanksgiving day -- mostly we shot clay pigeons (20 gauge and 12 gauge) but they would also haul out other guns - .44 handgun, other various rifles etc. But often they would say, "well, let's just shoot at that twig down there about 30 yards" It was terribly un-fun that way. I started taking my old tech books and place 4 or 5 in front of each other. That was a blast (literally) as you could track the bullet through the pages of the book. So cool! Great Science I remember they were shooting a hollow point out of the .44 pistol and the bullet hole was perfectly round on entry and halfway through an 800 page tech book but then somehwere around page 400 or so the bullet mis-formed and ripped a huge hole through the rest of the book. So, use your old tech books for target practice.
A couple of years after graduating from college, I was moving again and had a LARGE box of textbooks I could not sell and didn't need. I took them to a friend's home, and we used them for target practice, using .22, .30-30, .30-06, and .44 cap-n-ball. A good time was had by all!
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dandy72 wrote:
Things might be different in the software world; if you need a license to use some software, and the customer needs to run that software, this makes sense...but books? Even though you hand it to the customer after the job's done, you don't wipe out from your mind what you've learned from the book. You're the main beneficiary. And the customer (in all likelihood) also has no need for the book.
You have that backwards. In the situations I mentioned, the client had need for the books after I left, while I didn't. Especially in the 90's, it was common for me to do a 3, 6, 9, or 12 month contract that used technologies I was not familiar with. This is unlike today when customers expect 5 to 10 years of experience in a technology that's been on the market 3 months. The list of technologies I used once on one contract is a lonnnggg one ... so I had no need to keep the books. OTOH, the customer had an ongoing investment in specific technologies, so they did need the books. Mostly to train new people who had no familiarity with the technologies.
BryanFazekas wrote:
The list of technologies I used once on one contract is a lonnnggg one ... so I had no need to keep the books. OTOH, the customer had an ongoing investment in specific technologies, so they did need the books. Mostly to train new people who had no familiarity with the technologies.
So the people who need work to be done suddenly become responsible for training the people they're going to hand the contract to? That sounds backwards to me. You might invest in your own employees, but if I was looking to hand off some work to people that are not in my employment, whoever responds to my contract offer would be expected to know the subject matter, or make it their own responsibility. If something's entirely proprietary, then sure. But if it's based on something that is common enough to have some books published about it, then...not so much. But again: I've never done any contract work.
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You'd lose it if you saw our archives at work, stored in a lab. We have somewhere around 8,000 CD and DVD discs backing up product builds. The last couple of years backups are written to Flash drives, since most of our product builds are larger than a couple DVD's. We have one that's 25GB :omg: .
Software Zen:
delete this;Actually, I'm not surprised by your work collection. Up until we replaced it 2 years ago, we had 20+ years of installers for an ancient product. Multiply that by 1,000 ... and it probably matches what you have. :laugh:
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BryanFazekas wrote:
The list of technologies I used once on one contract is a lonnnggg one ... so I had no need to keep the books. OTOH, the customer had an ongoing investment in specific technologies, so they did need the books. Mostly to train new people who had no familiarity with the technologies.
So the people who need work to be done suddenly become responsible for training the people they're going to hand the contract to? That sounds backwards to me. You might invest in your own employees, but if I was looking to hand off some work to people that are not in my employment, whoever responds to my contract offer would be expected to know the subject matter, or make it their own responsibility. If something's entirely proprietary, then sure. But if it's based on something that is common enough to have some books published about it, then...not so much. But again: I've never done any contract work.
dandy72 wrote:
But again: I've never done any contract work.
The world was a lot different 30 years ago. In the PC world technology was changing rapidly, and the availability of experienced folks in new technology was limited. Customers wanted experienced IT people that could quickly learn new tech and rapidly become proficient. I worked for a mid-range consulting firm for 15 years over several tenures -- one year at my annual review I had input from 5 managers because I had a series of ~3 month contracts, all using different technologies. You didn't experience this, so it is foreign to you. Consider that when a new technology comes out, e.g., Rust, companies MUST train people in the tech, as the pool of available talent is zilch. And consider that companies like contractors, as it's easy to get rid of them. Just cancel the contract or fail to renew it. Getting rid of FTEs without legal difficulties and/or causing morale problems is far more difficult.
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BryanFazekas wrote:
Is there any value in books this old? WordPress is probably 12 yo and it's the youngest. ASP and XML are circa 2000, and C is circa 1990.
Yes, for historical purposes. But, not in physical format. You never know when you'll need it. Yes it's outdated tech, but for studying history it's nice to get context. Unless you know for certain you'll never, ever use that tech again. If there are eBook versions, get those and recycle the paper version if you don't want to lug it around. It'll be searchable too. If there aren't any eBook versions, consider making an eBook out of them. There are machines that'll take care of the grunt work for you. You can use a book scanning service. Sometimes, just sometimes, you want info that's out of print. Like when MSDN dumped all their Win32 info after .NET came out.
Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Unless you know for certain you'll never, ever use that tech again.
This is where I am. None of the books I listed in the OP will be of use to me, and I haven't opened any of them in at least 8 years, possibly 30 years for the C book. Just taking up space.
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A couple of years after graduating from college, I was moving again and had a LARGE box of textbooks I could not sell and didn't need. I took them to a friend's home, and we used them for target practice, using .22, .30-30, .30-06, and .44 cap-n-ball. A good time was had by all!
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jschell wrote:
except you just stated that some of them you had never read and that you would never use them again.
Which doesn't make them valueless. In that particular case *I* just wasn't the target audience. I just wanted to salvage this brand new set of 6 or 7 volumes, headed for the dumpster, still shrink-wrapped together. Very technical, very expensive, but I just never went in that direction.
dandy72 wrote:
Which doesn't make them valueless.
But you said "...books were just taking up place in a number of boxes on the floor of a closet." You wanted the storage. You didn't want to build an addition onto your house to provide that storage. Which is the same problem the library has. Except multiplied by thousands.