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[OC] Academic textbooks being discarded from abandoned university buildings. More photos in post. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 months ago* by to c/pics@lemmy.world
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Aberystwyth University closed one of its campuses a few years ago. The place has been left to rot, but recently they’ve started clearing the place out, and removing all the old scientific textbooks. Most of them look untouched. Wonder how much this lot would have set students back if buying new.

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[–] 52 points 2 months ago (17 children)

Depending on what exactly they are, these books may be practically worthless. I recently looked into selling some of my old college textbooks (that were $50-100 each at purchase), and they currently list online for <$5 each. Old editions are of no use to current students, and there's no demand for previous editions (while there's a good deal of supply).

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  • [–] 36 points 2 months ago* (9 children)

    It’s mostly to do with testing questions changing every year, and nothing else. Which is gross and reason 8114 that academic publishing companies should have their boards vivisected.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    It really depends on the subject; mathematics for instance probably isn't going to change much decade to decade, but psychology is changing constantly.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago* (4 children)

    Their tactic is to change the homework questions and reorder some stuff every year so they can force everyone to buy new textbooks.

    The actual content changes very little.

    Some professors will just copy the new questions and hand them out so kids can get used books.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    The amazing profs will include practice question lists for multiple editions, but that's a lot of work.

    The good ones stick to one edition of the book for a number of years, so that you can buy used books.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    The best profs provide a pdf of questions and don’t expect you to buy a book 😅.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago*

    I've never assigned a textbook. It's the wrong way to teach science because no scientists consult textbooks.

    Textbooks are about universities in a racket with publishers to sell books in their campus stores. Publishers don't even pay authors on most textbooks.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Genetics: my professor was the text author. He said that the information in chapter [let's pretend it's # 27] was bleeding edge when he wrote it six months prior to publishing, but it was out of date by the time it published and was very out of date now, a year later.

    He gave us all his notes on the current version of the chapter and told us about the research coming in a few weeks that up render his new chapter obsolete so don't study too close.

    I can't imagine publishing an up to date genetics text

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    I'm guessing that the big books are old collections of scientific journals. Depending on the journal, you could have multiple of those tomes per year. These days scientists access journals digitally, so there's little benefit to keeping the physical copies around in most cases

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