Eliminating old books
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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 Yes it's outdated tech, but for studying history it's nice to get context.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.
