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Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
11–20 of 73 posts
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#12download a digital copy from the web. throw out the paper.
I did a clean out a couple of years back of cassettes, books, CDs, and vinyl LPs and replaced them with digital copies. I also threw out the IKEA Billy bookcase they had been stored in.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#13give them to homeless shelters, or any charity, maybe someone will get interested and you'll change a life, even if the book is outdated
the main reason I'm where I am today is the 2 programming books I got as a birthday gift at 10 yo
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#14The binding of books makes them hard to recycle and usually they just get trashed.
Don’t waste charity shop time, if you have technical books that are of no historical interest and are long irrelevant with expired technologies, just trash them, they served their purpose.
Ask yourself if there is a practical chance that a particular book would be able to get into the hands of someone who would actually value the information inside. If not, garbage.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#15I used to sell old IT books on Amazon or Ebay. Thankfully most were more timeless than "Foo 1.2.3 in 21 days". Once I even acquired and sold a one-foot-cube-sized MSDN box for about a thousand dollars. Both of us made a lot of money.
At some point Ebay deleted my account and I recreated it later but lost my history. Amazon now requires invasive identity verification I refuse and won't let me sell anymore, despite having over a decade doing it in good standing. It is possible it was related to me briefly selling an ebook, which doing permanently took away some of my privileges. Dunno for sure, the site is obtuse and has more archaic layers than the Windows control panel. Easy to get into a link loop and never find out why it doesn't work.
TL;DR—These big companies just DGAF. I now throw old IT books in the trash/recycle-bin when I move. Currently have some about CMS that would be useful to someone.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#16download a digital copy from the web. throw out the paper. I did a clean out a couple of years back of cassettes, books, CDs, and vinyl LPs and replaced them with digital copies. I also threw out the IKEA Billy bookcase they had been stored in.
I kind of love this idea. How do you do this, especially if you're throwing originals away, in a frustratingly and methodically legal way?
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#17Most of them are pretty thick so they can be used to line the walls of bunkers for extra bullet proofing.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#18Honestly, I am super into old computers and have bought antiquated manuals. There are a ton of people into it. Depending upon what you have, I’d actually take them off your hands… like the Java book. I don’t care about Dreamweaver, but someone would. Post them on eBay. If the buyer pays shipping, anything is better than nothing right?
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#19I put mine in a near by Little Free Library and in a few days they'd all been claimed.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with old computer books?
#20Stuff that is specific to old versions of applications is probably best used for kindling or to show off how awesome your 50 cal is. Stuff that is more theory based will be appreciated by somebody.
My father had shelves of computer science books from the 50s and 60s - the first half of the books would always be dedicated to how to decipher a particular professor’s writing and flow charting style, and then it would get into the actual computer science. Nobody writes books like that anymore. He also had a complete set of IBM System/360 manuals at one point. Then he threw everything away and it just killed me. He had boxes of both used and unused IBM punch cards that suffered the same fate. I would have hsuled it all off just for nostalgia value if I had known.