Out of Pod Experience

I lost a game of horseshoes to Ray Charles

In your defence Ray Charles did use the first prototype of Radar shades.

I love you Alara. You're the gift that keeps on giving.

Well, it looks like the thread has reached its end.

xoxoxox

It's not just the Americans, If I remember correctly, the Russians reused or melted down a pretty hefty chunk of their early ground breaking stuff as well.

Industrial-scale book destruction is going on at the British Library, possibly the most prestigious library in the world (you can tell because it's British). Recent book-pulping scandals have hit the University of New South Wales in Australia, as well as several other institutions. Hell, when Borders bookstores went belly-up earlier this year, they decided to destroy all the unsold books instead of donate them.

And no, I'm not just talking about duplicates and old TV Guides, either. Imagine holding a beautiful, dusty, illustrated volume of Shakespeare printed in the 1700s, a calligraphic message from its long-dead owner inscribed on the inside cover, and throwing it straight in the trash. I've been there, more than once. I could have kept it and maybe gotten a few hundred dollars for it on eBay, if my supervisor wasn't watching with specific orders to prevent me from doing that.

And we're talking about a lot of books here -- these libraries are having to cut down their stock in a hurry. Imagine you're the manager of a library, and some accountant tells you that you need to get rid of 100,000 books, and do it in a week. You really have two options. One, you can get a bunch of academics to scour your collection and painstakingly rate each book according to its value and importance. Then you can hire a bunch of people to take down the 100,000 least important books and painstakingly stamp and debug them, one by one. Your second option is to get the computer to spit out a list of the 100,000 least borrowed books, and hire a few people to walk down the aisles with their arms out, throwing those books in a shredding machine.

That second option is much quicker and much cheaper. Sometimes you can find a paper recycling centre that will pay you for the pulp, so destroying the books leads to a net profit. Nobody likes it, but for a librarian it's like your best friend just got bitten by a zombie and you're the only one with a gun.

hough everyone realizes that extremely valuable books are going to inevitably get caught in the same net, there's not much that can be done about it. Nobody is going to order a first-edition Moby-**** from a library warehouse if the 2011 reprint is sitting right there on the shelf. A computer list that ranks books by popularity can't tell the difference.