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Ask HN: What should you do with a large collection of math books

by waivej on 8/9/22, 12:15 PM with 13 comments

How you would help a retired math professor that has a collection of books gathered over a lifetime? They are all math/physics related and many were passed along from other colleagues. Their hope is to pass them along in the same way. They cover three walls of a small office.

He mentioned that pre-covid, he would have left them in boxes outside the office for a few semesters and pass along the rest. Also that students that would send them back to their home countries to setup small libraries. A book dealer helped catalog them but said they were domain specific and hard to sell locally.

  • by eimrine on 8/9/22, 2:03 PM

    I think the best thing you can do with English books, no matter what discipline, is to let them travel abroad. I'm Ukrainian and all the science books I can buy have shitty translations. I once bought 20 used books from Amazon and spent $20 on the books, $70 on Amazon shipping, and $110 on air shipping to Ukraine. I don't know how to get English books from abroad cheaper, but at least it was worth it.

  • by toomuchtodo on 8/9/22, 7:11 PM

    The Internet Archive will accept them. They will be scanned and provided to the world for free as part of their library collection. If you’re in the US, it will be very inexpensive to ship them via media mail.

    https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

    https://youtu.be/RV_ALlJGU_c

  • by freedude on 8/9/22, 5:19 PM

    You have plenty of great suggestions below.

    Another would be to contact local homeschooling groups and see if there is any interest. In groups that emphasize Classical education it is common for those gifted in mathematics and sciences to not only thrive but excel and they might welcome the advanced content of some of these.

  • by epilys on 8/9/22, 3:34 PM

    In my electrical and computer engineering university, I volunteered at the department's library. Retiring professors were our biggest source of books (there was no allocated budget, so we could not buy new stock and relied on donations).

    When we did the weeding to accept only the useful stuff, we separated the "rejects" into a request-only section in the basement and the rest we left outside in the hallway for free giveaway.

    All was gone incredibly fast and we didn't have to handle anything else. Curious minds and free books pair together very well.

  • by marcescence on 8/9/22, 2:34 PM

    I would be willing to buy a significant chunk of them at least. If you're interested, please email me at lampspites@proton.me.

  • by goy on 8/9/22, 1:52 PM

    If you can't sell them, give them away.

  • by ColinWright on 8/9/22, 12:57 PM

    Do you have a link to the catalog? Without knowing more about them it's impossible to suggest anything.

  • by wilburm on 8/10/22, 1:16 PM

    Give them to me! :)