I’ve had courses where the professor specifically said “The current edition of this book is the 3rd edition, but the 2nd edition is better, so you can use either”, and then looked up what the homework problem numbers were in both. But yeah, that takes some extra effort.
On the other hand, I’ve also heard of professors writing the book themself, printing it in the absolute cheapest manner possible (we’re talking comb binding, here), making it a required text for the course, and then charging $300 for it.
Honestly, though, the current trend of online textbooks usually seems to add enough value that I almost don’t even mind the textbook money-mill any more.
So many of them were worthless even when new, sad to say, even if some students were suckered into paying $80 for them. If you can identify these, please, please try to recycle them in an environmentally-friendly manner and keep them out of our libraries and bookstores.
gonzoron, before you throw away your old textbooks or donate them to charity or sell them to a used bookstore, find out if there is a store near you that buys old textbooks. They will then sell or rent them to college students that need them, so they will pay you a little more than other places. If you have other books to get rid of besides the old textbooks, bring them along and see if the store will take them too. I mentioned this in a previous post, as did Elmer_J.Fudd. Find out if there is a store specializing in old textbooks near you. Just search on your location (or the name of a university near you) along with the words “buys old textbooks”. Where do you live, incidentally?
The reason I was faithful about selling them back after each semester is that not long after that they wouldn’t be worth anything. Even more so now with online resources available.
Back when one of my camping buddies was going through law school, he would bring a different text or two with him every trip. Since we camp in the boonies and shoot a lot, these became prime targets. He always got the first shot at them, and always chose a 12 gauge. Then we’d burn what was left that we could pick up.
You could scan them, then recycle the pages. If you look around, you are bound to find someone who can scan them for a reasonable price. I looked around my area and found someone who would scan my old text books for $20.00 a book. This solution gives you the best of everything. The books get removed, but you still have the information that you poured your heart and soul into learning when you were…
Hi folks - If we read the OP for content, his youngest textbook is 14-15 years old. The oldest are 27-28 years old. These are science / engineering texts. Plus the even older books he inherited from even older relatives.
There is ZERO chance a college bookstore or a near-campus reseller will want such ancient Textes Fromme The Beforye Tymes to resell to current students. Explanations of phlogiston and the four humours have gone out of style.
What he has is a bunch of useless moldering paper full of wrong information. I too used to have a great whacking collection of books. I get it; paper books are a religious topic for some. They were for me. But STEM texts are more like magazines; their useful shelf life is measured in months and maybe in years, but not decades.
Saying that old textbooks are “full of wrong information” is wildly exaggerated. It may be true that no college uses those textbooks these days and thus that textbook resellers don’t want them, but that’s more a matter of colleges and professors insisting that new textbooks be assigned every few years. When I look through my old math textbooks on my shelves, the only things that might be clearly out of date are those like the mentions (before 1994) of Fermat’s Last Theorem as being an unsolved problem. Here’s an idea though. Do you know any teenagers who are deeply interested in STEM matters but have little contact with college libraries or professors? (This certainly described me at one point.) Show them the books and ask them if they want any of them for free. I know that a lot of you think that everyone grows up in an environment where bright kids are encouraged to excel at their studies in high school and college, but I know from experience that that isn’t always true.
My astronomy text from 1974 mentions that some astronomers have looked at aggregate star field photos to try and guess whether there are large planets circling these stars, but attributes much of the evidence to the slight deformation of telescopes due to gravity over the years, so no exoplanet data is reliable.
Oh, and that maybe in a decade or two that someone could put a largish telescope in orbit where it avoided atmospheric distortion.
Math ( and a couple of other subjects ) and children’s textbooks might be special cases , but lots of textbooks (not limited to STEM subjects) will be outdated within 15 years and probably nearly all of them will be outdated within 30. And at some point “outdated” becomes “wrong”.
I was speaking in the context of reselling them to bookstores to resell to students taking their courses in 2021-2022. In that context they’re dead wrong.
As an instrument of nostalgia the story of those books is different. And more nuanced as several posters have said.
I still have my undergrad Physics 102/102 text. At that level of science nothing material has changed except the standard pedagogy.
My textbook for my 300 level class in compiler design? Not a damn thing in the book is anything but quaint. It’s a text about building wooden buckboards, not modern automobiles.
I don’t really think that someone today who is 14 and starting high school later this year who today picks up and reads for free a 1974 textbook on astronomy is going to tell his astronomy professor in 2025, “You know, some of the facts in this newly published astronomy textbook are clearly wrong. The 1974 textbook that really got me interested in astronomy says so. It’s well known that we have no knowledge of planets around other stars. Also, there are no telescopes orbiting the Earth.” If it really bothers you that the old textbook you give to a bright teenager might mislead them about topics of which much additional information is known these days, tell them explicitly to look up their facts on Wikipedia before they talk to a professor of the subject.
You’re assuming that there is no possible use for an old textbook except as a textbook. I have a personal example to show this isn’t correct. I have found new information about a subject using two textbooks published well before I was born. I have done some research into the writings of C. S. Lewis. In his book The Abolition of Man, he uses two textbooks as an example of some philosophical points that he disagrees with. He deliberately hides the real names of the books and their authors because he doesn’t want what he says to be a personal attack on them, just a commentary the ubiquity of the philosophical points they make. He calls one of the books The Green Book, which he says is by Gaius and Titius. The other book he doesn’t give a name to but he calls the author Orbilius.
Before I began my research, someone was able to discover what the real names and authors of these textbooks were, apparently by doing a search on the quotations that Lewis gives from these books. I decided I wanted to read them to see what they actually said in order to check if Lewis was accurately disagreeing with their philosophical points. I then searched for them using abe.com and found that there were some copies available of these books, which at that point were high school textbooks that were then (eleven years ago) about seventy years old and were used mostly in Australia. That gave me a start on the research I have done on Lewis’s claims and the backgrounds of these books and their authors. Had everyone simply thrown out these books as soon as they ceased to be used as textbooks, any such research would be impossible.
I was just giving examples - but the basics of astronomy - the main sequence, the assorted exceptions, galaxies, etc. - foundationally it is all correct. the same I’m sure is true of physics other than cutting edge quark theories, and also the same with chemistry and basic biology. Statistics, accounting, etc. - same, the basics haven’t changed, some emphasis may have shifted in modern usage.
In fact, computers have become so convoluted that a set of early textbooks might be very useful in grounding the technology. I have one text that walks a person through the construction of a 1970’s level minicomputer; before lookahead buffers, pipelined processing, prefetch memory, multi-core, etc. and gives a good grounding in assembler, which is what all computing is based on (so far). You learn one computer language, you will have less trouble with others.
I remember having a discussion back in the early 90’s, laughing about nerd-level stuff with a friend’s high-school-age kid. When I was in school, people asked what good was learning all this x-y coordinate math because it had zero real-world applications, and then it became the basis for anyone wanting to program something as common and lucrative as a video game’s graphics and action.
Yes, these are interesting books - but as mentioned, for resale or textbook use in real life they will have zero applicability. Their survival depends on them being referenced elsewhere and quoted and critiqued, which actually would be a rarity for most textbooks.
This is what I wonder about with the future - without hard copy, without actual physical CD’s and DVD’s, how much of our written and audio-visual culture will simply evaporate with erasures and hardware failure? (It’s already becoming a joke that this has happened with early-generated bitcoin).
I have several boxes of textbooks and other books hanging around, that aren’t being disposed of because “they may be useful to somebody for something.”
I just did a very quick search on “donate books” and Google completed with “to africa”, so I took it. That brings up https://www.booksforafrica.org/, which collects books and sends them to Africa. They are very clear about textbooks:
primary, secondary, and college textbooks (soft and hard cover) published in the last 15 years.
reference books published in the last 10 years, except encyclopedia sets.
medical, nursing, and IT books published in the last 10 years.
Looking over some groups that send books to prisons, the thing they seem to want the most are paper back dictionaries. Things they do not want are any hard cover books, and “books you would not give as a gift to a friend.” Paper back books published in the last 5 years about trades (electrician, commercial driver, etc.) and law books also are useful to them.
The question here is old textbooks. I don’t think there is a satisfactory answer. If they have pretty pictures, they may be useful to somebody for an art project, but otherwise recycling (which may require deconstruction) or the landfill.
Whatever you do, don’t throw them out your car window while driving down the highway.
TL:DR: A guy had too many books, so to dispose of them he would throw a few out of his car window on his early morning drive to work. Where the books along the highway were coming from was a mystery for many months.