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- Hacker News
- The Great Pulping is the name, or rather names, that modern historians have given to two legendary events which were supposed to have occured early in the Confusion Era. The first of these events was when libraries converted from a primarly paper-based form of information storage to a digital form. A majority of library book collections were scanned, digitized, and then once the information was stored in digital forms, the books were sold to be pulped in order to free up room for library patrons to use the new system more effectively. Of course, the librarians could not know what was going to happen in the future to all this information, what with the viruses, cross-copying, AI hallucinations, archival rivalries, meme wars, and all the other diverse information-distorting causes of the Confusion.
The second event refers to what happened to the librarians who had been responsible for this decision, when the full effects of it became evident.
- A legendarium of the Confusion Era, by Franklin Duane, 192 PCE Edition
by FiatLuxDave - This paragraph made me chuckle:
> When Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her will bequeathed her library to the sons of two friends of hers. The first, William Royall Tyler, Jr., stored his half in a warehouse on the outskirts of London. The other half went to Colin Clark, who let the books molder for decades at his family castle in Kent until financial troubles prompted his brother to begin selling off chunks of it to various dealers in rare books. Clark’s half was painstakingly recovered and brought back to the Mount, but the other half was destroyed in 1941, during the London Blitz.
Man plans, and God laughs, as they say.
by roughly - On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection management, and they have to do it in the context of dropping budgets and greater demands for student meeting and study space. What do you expect to happen? Faculty often don’t have any idea how the systems that support them actually function, but things have to actually be made to work.by hcayless
- Modern public libraries primarily serve other purposes than paper book lending. University libraries don’t face that constraint but with the Library of Congress and Google we have a safe copy for surviving civilizations. So the only question now is how one accesses the content.
I’ve fantasized (like other datahoarders) of personal archives - and I do have a few hundreds of gigabytes of textual content archived for myself and to LORA my machines into. Copyright law does make it hard to have a co-op of book scanners but I can scan all of mine for myself.
Perhaps the future will be universal access but in the event it is not, perhaps my children will benefit from the family archive - though a future Primer must necessarily sort out the vast quantities of it that are inexplicably fan fiction erotica.
by arjie - The Library of Congress embarked on a disastrous microfilm initiative concomitant with the destruction of the works being microfilmed that left millions of the only remaining newspaper archives and some books totally or partially unreadable.by Amezarak
- As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so, these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool empty libraries picking up random books as a child.
OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same".
Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, through a destructive process...
by jjkaczor - Digitalization through a destructive process is what was used to train or future overlords.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
by buildsjets - You can get the 8-bay Synology, with its two expansion chassis that's room for about eighteen 24tb drives. Anna's Archive, Libgen, and archive.org provide enough bandwidth that your problem becomes even knowing what titles to download. For the first year or so, you have big long lists of things you know you must have, but even though you didn't quite write them all out (often you just jot down "everything by [author's name]" you eventually finish that up. You start grabbing every book title/cover you see anywhere... and though I'm not particularly proud of it, 4chan often outperforms HN (and though no one would believe it, most of those aren't Mein Kampf).
Really, we need a gigantic bibliography project of some sort. These 2648 titles are the core computer science bibliography would be a big help. Or these 17,852 titles are the core 1970s harlequin romance novels.
>Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, t
He wasn't able to predict that they'd just shred the books without bothering to digitize them though.
- I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them.
My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.
by andrewla - Dijkstra? What is your go-to Dijkstra paper? His papers are like The short stories of Philip K Dick. Everything seems fine and straight forward, until you step into another world.
You are indeed privileged. What you have gained by reading them, is more than an education: It would be a journey, to read them, and your commentary.
I picked up a science fiction book, in a recycle bin, that for the most part belonged there, except for one chapter... one short chapter-and after I read it, the world started to swirl... "Human language had by this time, become mostly telepathic." Thank you, Joe Haldeman.
And Thank you Edsger W. Dijkstra.
by ForOldHack - I was a real university librarian for a decade. Most of the books they throw away are truly garbage. Yes some libraries take it too far with "weeding" too much, but it is necessary:
1) the space is needed for other purposes (even though funding for said purpose might not be secured) 2) having shelves of useless junk makes discovering useful good stuff much harder 3) the university library has a mandate to support the curriculum of courses being taught, not being a repository of all human writing
Yes interlibrary loan UX sucks (although at my library I made it quite good!) and yes interlibrary loan needs to be pushed much harder.
by jswelker - Sensationalism. That's routine collection management.
Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...
by ciscoriordan - Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not dumpstered.
Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldn’t yet be called routine. Objecting to this trend is still very much appropriate.
by TFNA - > the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them feature books
Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.
by kristjansson - Yep, also meeting rooms for various clubs. My university genuinely had a wine tasting club that met in the library.by nitwit005
- Even going back decades, I recall major US university libraries served a dual function as having books, reference librarians, and serving as study and group work spaces. Maybe it's changed a bit but it's not new.by ghaff
- I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing.
Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them.
But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.
I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.
by SMV279438 - Utah Valley University?by goldfishgold
- Years ago I did an exploratory UX spike, an attempt to make history more tangible, by giving each day a dot (so a couple of centuries fit on a screen), with the dots providing, among other things, scans of that day's newspapers and magazines. Nice for browsing/surfing history. Part of not pursuing it further, was newspapers - and historically there were many many more newspapers per region, let alone per person - newspapers were already mostly paywalled, and becoming less available with time. Even libraries which did their own scanning of archived local papers, would grow tired of support, and turn them over for paywalling. My understanding was there was little money in it, but all it takes is enough to scatter moats everywhere, to make a terrain inaccessible to broad access.by mncharity
- Yes, exploration, discovery. One doesn't stumble across items available on inter-library loan.
I could not count the number of books I picked up and enjoyed, even if only for a short while, whilst I was studying at uni.
by Walf - I had the experience at uni in the 1980s of seeing the film The Last Emperor, which at one point includes a bit where a Time Magazine photographer is present. I realised that this probably meant that Time had run an item on the (then newly-crowned Japanese puppet) emperor Puyi of Manchukuo (occupied China).
So I headed to the campus library, serials room, which had bound volumes of Time along with many other publications, and shelf-scanned the appropriate date ranges around 1934 until I found the edition with the story. Read that, which was insightful (a question I'd had was whether or not Puyi was seen at the time as a puppet, and yes, he very much was).
I am fearful that this experience could not be replicated today, and that those stacks may well have been cleared.
by dredmorbius - I have even experienced this in my personal life -- I like in NYC and when I moved here I had to get rid of a ton of books. The ones that I could not bring myself to part with ended up in boxes in my parent's basement where they remain to this day.
Many of my fondest memories growing up was browsing the bookshelves in my childhood home, discovering books that I remember to this day. Now I read almost exclusively on my kindle and the browsing experience is just so terrible. I feel I have failed my children in a real way by not giving them access to this.
by andrewla - At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm.
People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that
by gammalost - For how many thousands of years were books equivalent to absurd wealth. Kings might own a book, or several. Libraries were amazing, but places never seen by the proles and serfs. Thousands of years is a duration more than long enough to give our species some instinctual reverence for the object, reverence that is only reinforced by what we learn from an early age about those. And it's not just the wealth, at least for some sizable fraction of the population, we come to know books as things of knowledge and power, so slurring them as mere commodities is low-handed.
Books are, I think, in some small way, sacred. And I don't want to associate with people who think otherwise. I don't think you get it at all.
- It’s either that, or an extreme conservatism where nothing must deviate from how it used to be.
- I think that’s a relatively fair take. Personally I prefer ebooks or audiobooks mostly because I can put thousands in my pocket/e-reader and carry it with me and I prefer the experience of reading a book on my reader over paper.
For me, books are closer to art than functional objects. I have a wall of bookshelves in my house that I love and I’m slowly filling them with my favorite books. I will probably never reread any of them (I’ll read the ebook version instead) but I like looking at them and I like being able to loan them out or for them to be a conversation starter.
It took me a while to be ok with that (treating books as art) but I’ve made my peace with it. I’m buy 99% used books from places like AbeBooks online or Half Price Books locally and I have no interest in “books by the foot” or similar. It’s more like my bookshelves are mini-shrines to authors or series that have been impactful to me.
by joshstrange - I don't know whether to call it fetishism, which has a negative undertone to me.
But I do love physical books. Even unimposing books, I like reading them but also touching them, their smell, their covers. And for art books, I think it goes without saying that the experience of the digital version is markedly different to the physical version.
I love going to a used books store and simply perusing their shelves, occasionally buying something, and a digital library simply cannot replicate this.
by the_af - I stayed at an Airbnb that had fake books on the shelves! I looked them up and they aren't even especially cheap. But they probably get stolen a lot less.by ciscoriordan
- My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place.
I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.
by bastawhiz - Anyone remember this story about two librarians (hackers?) accused of creating fake borrowers in order to prevent books from being weed out? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/06/florida-librar...by lgvld