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dandy72 wrote: They wouldn't take anything older than 5 years. Yet these are the same people who are constantly complaining they're underfunded. They weren't junk, and I'm sure if I had bothered I might have found some buyers, even if only for historical value.
Err...except you just stated that some of them you had never read and that you would never use them again.
Libraries of course must either store books or dispose of them. Which costs money. You know the part where funding comes in.
And computing has impacted them as well. So they can easily track titles and genres which people do read and those that they don't. So they maximize the potential.
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jschell wrote: except you just stated that some of them you had never read and that you would never use them again.
Which doesn't make them valueless.
In that particular case I just wasn't the target audience. I just wanted to salvage this brand new set of 6 or 7 volumes, headed for the dumpster, still shrink-wrapped together. Very technical, very expensive, but I just never went in that direction.
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dandy72 wrote: Which doesn't make them valueless.
But you said
"...books were just taking up place in a number of boxes on the floor of a closet."
You wanted the storage. You didn't want to build an addition onto your house to provide that storage.
Which is the same problem the library has. Except multiplied by thousands.
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dandy72 wrote: Things might be different in the software world; if you need a license to use some software, and the customer needs to run that software, this makes sense...but books? Even though you hand it to the customer after the job's done, you don't wipe out from your mind what you've learned from the book. You're the main beneficiary. And the customer (in all likelihood) also has no need for the book.
You have that backwards. In the situations I mentioned, the client had need for the books after I left, while I didn't.
Especially in the 90's, it was common for me to do a 3, 6, 9, or 12 month contract that used technologies I was not familiar with. This is unlike today when customers expect 5 to 10 years of experience in a technology that's been on the market 3 months.
The list of technologies I used once on one contract is a lonnnggg one ... so I had no need to keep the books. OTOH, the customer had an ongoing investment in specific technologies, so they did need the books. Mostly to train new people who had no familiarity with the technologies.
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BryanFazekas wrote: The list of technologies I used once on one contract is a lonnnggg one ... so I had no need to keep the books. OTOH, the customer had an ongoing investment in specific technologies, so they did need the books. Mostly to train new people who had no familiarity with the technologies.
So the people who need work to be done suddenly become responsible for training the people they're going to hand the contract to? That sounds backwards to me. You might invest in your own employees, but if I was looking to hand off some work to people that are not in my employment, whoever responds to my contract offer would be expected to know the subject matter, or make it their own responsibility.
If something's entirely proprietary, then sure. But if it's based on something that is common enough to have some books published about it, then...not so much.
But again: I've never done any contract work.
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dandy72 wrote: But again: I've never done any contract work.
The world was a lot different 30 years ago. In the PC world technology was changing rapidly, and the availability of experienced folks in new technology was limited. Customers wanted experienced IT people that could quickly learn new tech and rapidly become proficient. I worked for a mid-range consulting firm for 15 years over several tenures -- one year at my annual review I had input from 5 managers because I had a series of ~3 month contracts, all using different technologies. You didn't experience this, so it is foreign to you.
Consider that when a new technology comes out, e.g., Rust, companies MUST train people in the tech, as the pool of available talent is zilch.
And consider that companies like contractors, as it's easy to get rid of them. Just cancel the contract or fail to renew it. Getting rid of FTEs without legal difficulties and/or causing morale problems is far more difficult.
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Old books are of two general types:
1. Programming-language specific
2. Language-agnostic like Algorithms, Maths, OS theory, etc.
Type 2 books are less likely to have expiry dates, IMHO.
(Of course, fiction, history, etc. books are of a different realm altogether).
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The Dragon book.
Since the newest one costs something like $150 I figure I will hang on to the older version if I want to look something up.
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Over the last several years I have thinned my herd of technical books quite a bit. Here at work I have about 18 inches of shelf. At home it's about half a dozen volumes, a couple of college textbooks from 40 years ago plus some 'work' technical stuff.
I recently dumped a couple boxes of technical books I had stored at home. MS-DOS references, internals, and undocumented stuff. I used a lot of this back in the 90's at work.
Software Zen: delete this;
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This is a wide tangent, but I recently went through CDs and DVDs, and dumped at least 50. I had backups from ancient projects, installers from products I'd never use again (like VS 2008), etc.
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You'd lose it if you saw our archives at work, stored in a lab. We have somewhere around 8,000 CD and DVD discs backing up product builds. The last couple of years backups are written to Flash drives, since most of our product builds are larger than a couple DVD's. We have one that's 25GB  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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Actually, I'm not surprised by your work collection. Up until we replaced it 2 years ago, we had 20+ years of installers for an ancient product. Multiply that by 1,000 ... and it probably matches what you have. 
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They are great for target practice.
My in-laws would shoot various guns on Thanksgiving day -- mostly we shot clay pigeons (20 gauge and 12 gauge) but they would also haul out other guns - .44 handgun, other various rifles etc.
But often they would say, "well, let's just shoot at that twig down there about 30 yards"
It was terribly un-fun that way.
I started taking my old tech books and place 4 or 5 in front of each other.
That was a blast (literally) as you could track the bullet through the pages of the book. So cool!
Great Science
I remember they were shooting a hollow point out of the .44 pistol and the bullet hole was perfectly round on entry and halfway through an 800 page tech book but then somehwere around page 400 or so the bullet mis-formed and ripped a huge hole through the rest of the book.
So, use your old tech books for target practice.
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Side note, bales of hay don't work so well for practice with a bow and arrow. The bale will start falling apart...
Jeremy Falcon
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Somehow this conjured up a mental image of some dumb action movie where the good guy dives behind a bale of hay for protection...
Something Weird Al would do anyway. 
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It's a shame I threw out all of the mechanical engineering textbooks from college. Even though I was a computer engineering major, I still had to take statics, dynamics, strength of materials, thermodynamics, and electromagnetics. They made up about 15% of the credit hours for my degree and have been utterly useless.
Those books would have made profoundly satisfying targets.
Software Zen: delete this;
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A couple of years after graduating from college, I was moving again and had a LARGE box of textbooks I could not sell and didn't need. I took them to a friend's home, and we used them for target practice, using .22, .30-30, .30-06, and .44 cap-n-ball. A good time was had by all!
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It really is a ton of fun. 
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I bought very few books. The "treasured" ones are from a very long time ago; 6502 programming, manuals for UK101 etc. A bigger problem for me, now acting as several inches of loft insulation, are user manuals and course materials that I wrote, for various software vendors. Can't chuck them as probably the only copies still in existence! 😂
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Hello Derek how are you ?
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I'm fine thanks. Haven't visited CP for a while, need to catch up... Change of routine. Good to see the CCC is back - an incentive to get going by 9am!
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BryanFazekas wrote: Is there any value in books this old? WordPress is probably 12 yo and it's the youngest. ASP and XML are circa 2000, and C is circa 1990.
Yes, for historical purposes. But, not in physical format. You never know when you'll need it. Yes it's outdated tech, but for studying history it's nice to get context. Unless you know for certain you'll never, ever use that tech again.
If there are eBook versions, get those and recycle the paper version if you don't want to lug it around. It'll be searchable too. If there aren't any eBook versions, consider making an eBook out of them. There are machines that'll take care of the grunt work for you. You can use a book scanning service.
Sometimes, just sometimes, you want info that's out of print. Like when MSDN dumped all their Win32 info after .NET came out.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: Like when MSDN dumped all their Win32 info after .NET came out.
MS published all of that in some "MSDN Library Archive" set, that came in two big blue CD binders. I made a point of keeping that one. This is not quite it, but very similar.
(actually I just found my copy of the disc that had the cover at the link above).
I remember also making a point of keeping the very first MSDN disc set. Grand total of 14 CDs, if I'm not mistaken. Then it quickly ballooned to hundreds of discs.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: Unless you know for certain you'll never, ever use that tech again.
This is where I am. None of the books I listed in the OP will be of use to me, and I haven't opened any of them in at least 8 years, possibly 30 years for the C book. Just taking up space.
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