unfortunately, in 1996 SF did just that, trashing–not donating-- 150,000 books because the new director wanted the library to be tech center instead
unfortunately, the costs to libraries for ebooks is also getting expensive
If I remember correctly, E-books can be changed retroactively, for good or bad reasons. Libraries don’t own e-books or e-journals, just give access to them. I hope someone is thinking about this. We wouldn’t want Winston Smith at Amazon changing history.
As for journals, I think more of them are getting to be electronic only, ditto for conference proceedings. That makes economic sense. But I hope libraries aren’t tossing journals that haven’t been digitized yet. I see people in my field treat papers published in works that haven’t gone into the IEEE Electronic Library yet like they don’t exist. 99% of them don’t matter, but I’ve seen students reinvent the wheel because a search didn’t pull up the relevant material. Digitizing old material is hard. The Times has done it for old material, but the quality is iffy and it is not searchable.
The profit potential of research e-journals is enormous, which is why its such a fertile field for predatory and scam publishers. The model is immaculate - scientists, historians, various ologists all create the content as part of their job → submit to journal → paper peer-reviewed by other scholars as part of their job → journal publishes paper and charges everyone for the privilege of reading it either now or ever. Total cost to publishers - an electronic letterbox to receive manuscripts, printing [diminishing as more journals go fully electronic], and a crack legal team to spackle over any cracks in the model.
Open access publication sounds good, but is usually secured by charging the author [ie the underlying research grant] a fee more than covering the likely future income derived from the article.
There have been page charges forever, even for relatively inexpensive IEEE journals. The scammish journals client base are researchers who are too incompetent to get published in a prestigious journal. It seems that some really bad schools accept any kind of publication, good schools have a good sense of the quality of a publication as measured by influence numbers.
I used to get email inviting me to publish in these things. If you remember some time ago some people at MIT created a technical paper generator (long before ChatGPT and not very good) and got papers accepted at for pay conferences and journals, many in China.
College papers require cites. APA or MLA are very specific. I know digital references are acceptable. But could that change as AI created articles flood the web? Books and journals are really the most trusted sources.
AI articles are flooding the web, because that’s where the real articles are. It’s no harder to print out a fake article than a real one, and if the real articles went back to hardcopy, then so would the fake ones.
It tremendously saddens me, too, but often when a library is getting rid of old books, there’s simply nobody who wants the vast majority of them, at all. If you let the Friends of the Library have them for a booksale, you might see 5 or 10% of them sold to people who want them, and then the rest have to be dumped anyway. What you get from that often isn’t worth the cost of putting up tables in a room and laying out the books and the volunteers’ time in setting up and running the sale.
In the mall half a mile from me, Beltway Plaza in Greenbelt, Maryland, there is something called the Free Market and Community Library. It’s hard to find anything that mentions it. In the following website, you can find a picture of it if you page down far enough. I had to page down 34 times for a good view of half of the shelves. You can bring anything you like to the shelves there at any time the mall is open and leave them there. Someone will pick them up eventually, since they are free to all takers. It has 24 shelves, each about four feet long. Over the past two or three years that it has existed, those shelves have gone back and forth from being utterly filled with interesting stuff to being nearly empty:
On those 24 shelves, you can put anything you like - books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, videotapes, clothes, balls of yarn, glasses, Christmas decorations, unopened food containers, silverware, sewing design patterns for making your own clothes, large pieces of cloth in various colors, toys, bookmarks, notebooks, etc. It all gets taken eventually. I don’t know of anything like it elsewhere. I stop by there about once a week and about half the time find a couple things I take home. It’s like a thrift store that charges nothing.
It all gets taken off the shelves by someone, but that’s not necessarily a customer. I guarantee you that some of what’s left on those shelves is literally garbage (as in, “get it out of here before the stink gets too bad”), and that volunteers have to go through every so often to throw the garbage away. And even some of the stuff that isn’t garbage, some of it has so low demand that it has to be thrown away anyway to make room on the shelves.
Even of the things that get taken away because someone wants them, what they’re wanted for might be something that destroys what it originally was, like clothes taken for use as rags or for fiber for paper-making, or metal things for scrap, or the like.
This discussion reminded me of this comic I first saw many years ago. “Sir this is a library. If you want a book, go to a bookstore”.
The trend has been happening for quite a while.
Well, no. Some books remain on the shelves for years. What remains on the shelf is not literally garbage. What’s wrong with using used clothes for rags? I sometimes cut my old clothes up into pieces. Each piece can then be used to repair something in another old piece of clothing that is still good enough to wear if something is fixed in it. You live three hundred miles away so you’ve never seen the Free Market and Community Library. Come visit me sometime and I’ll show it to you.
And even if some of the books do get used for making crafts, or even for firestarter: isn’t that better than filling up the landfill with them?
What remains on the shelf isn’t literally garbage, because the literal garbage gets thrown away by volunteers. But if you’ve got any place where people can leave anything they want, you’re going to get garbage there. That is, sadly, human nature.
MIT had somewhat misguidedly shelved the founder’s long-ago-donated personal collection into the general collection without making a separate catalog. In 1974 I had a work-study job there that involved a very tall rolling ladder in a very deep section of stacks, pulling every volume off the shelf one at a time and checking for his bookplate. No one knew, or seemed to care, how long it would take to find them ‘all’. I found ONE, if I remember correctly - but I found so many other interesting things that I often forgot to eat.
I would say they are better in the landfill (carbon sequestration) than burning which is pumping carbon into the atmosphere.
If people are using them for firestarter, they’re building that fire anyway. They’ll just start it with something else.
(My wood stove has an efficiency re-burning setup which really cuts down on the emissions. And if I weren’t burning that, I’d be burning a lot more fossil fuel; the living trees and new trees on the property which are busy taking up the space of the ones I’m burning are taking up carbon as the firewood, and more slowly rotting deadwood left in the woodlot, release it.
I don’t start the stove with old books – but I do start it with old newspaper.)
True. I just don’t think it’s bad burying carbon. And I speak as someone that loves a campfire/firepit fire on a Friday night 
Printing and distributing paper journals takes money and time. Distributing junk on the web is free. It is possible someone will print junk papers in junk journals, but reference librarians are unlikely to spend good money on them. Researchers in a field have a very good sense of journal quality, and even if they did buy a crap journal for some reason they’d probably hear from the professors to trash it.
Nobody puts things that are truly illegal on the shelves of the Free Market and Community Library. They don’t leave unwanted babies there. They don’t put poisonous snakes there. They don’t put food that they’ve eaten half of and leave the rest in a plate to rot. Those things would be illegal if they put them on a corridor in any shopping mall. Some more things that people might put in the Free Market and Community Library are jewelry, tools, art, baseball gloves, pens, Rubbermaid containers, small furniture, and pans.
There are many, many examples of very important research being rejected by the first journals it was submitted to, for example: