Would be better than letting them get rained on and thrown away

Can I toss a book of lewd poetry about chili in there first?

That's honestly a good use case for out of date textbook which knowledge is not useful anymore.

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.

Came here to say this. Most of these books are probably superseded by newer versions and/or already archived. Also, if these books have spent a lifetime untouched in a university, how useful are they, really?

When I was selling my books one semester, the bookstore (which kindly repurchased texts in good condition) offered me a coupon for half off a mediocre pizza. For all my books that semester.

I did not take the coupon

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

No worries, done. I couldn't see a way to crosspost from Piefed on the web, but Voyager on iOS seemed to let me do it no problem.

Sadly I think that reality is just an American one (I hope), in the UK I was either just given an old copy of the same textbook to keep or the ability to borrow it for the whole year from the library, depending on the book.

Depends on the field, no? I am studying math as hobby and books from over a century ago do pretty well.

Most do? There are higher concentrations of textbooks in some places like the library or bookstore, which do provide textbooks to students, but there will also be a ton of them spread throughout various offices and some classrooms. It's no surprise to me that they could fill multiple dumpsters with just textbooks.

Though hopefully they don't just trash all the furniture, as there could be millions worth of desks, chairs, tables, and shelving units, depending on how big the school is.

Did your university not have a library?

probably backstock from the store. Most of my professors expected every new class to re-buy the latest book for every class. The industry itself is rife with waste

My local library does not have university library volume. When they built a new library for the town (third one in my lifetime!) they made sure to put a room for the Friends of the Library Chronic Used Book Sale. They still pulped so many copies of twilight

The old reason to get a newer text book is that it's sometimes has a more clear explanation on a subject, or can include better diagrams and images. I remember looking at some older physics book and the info was so dense it made it hard to digest. This was ~2000 so books must have been from the 50s-70s

OMG absolutely, I stopped selling text books in my second year in Uni and I have used a number of them many times since, both professionally and personally.

Depends on who your professor was. I worked as an engineering lecturer for a few years. I told my students that having a reference text can be invaluable as you move through your career. For certain kinds of engineering, this is absolutely true. Paper reference texts have little long-term value in computer engineering. But civil or mechanical engineering? The principles of material strength do not change. And that's the kind of engineering I teach. So I really encourage students to get paper reference texts.

To facilitate this, I would always post homeworks that included scans of the full problems. I either wrote the problems from scratch or cut out problems from the textbook. I then told students to still buy the book, but buy a few editions back to get their reference text for a song. I still want my students to have a permanent physical book, but if you design your course right, they won't need the newest edition.