alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure about other countries. There is a culture refuse to throw away books in Germany. People would put on the streets for free (I found two interesting books with this method).
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German book culture is great! When he was in Karlsruhe to profile Peter Sloterdijk, The New Yorker reporter Thomas Meaney seemed surprised by it:
"Over the summer, ordinary Germans who spotted his [Peter Sloterdijk] books in my hands engaged me in conversation on trains, in coffee shops, at universities, and in bookshops." [0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/a-celebrity-ph...
Every now and then I need to go to the recycling station here in Denmark. They have a special container/dumpster just for books. The second hand shops will take a small quantum of books, stores the buy and resell old DVDs, games, records, porn, comics and what-not, no longer buy books as there's no profit in second hand books. The dumpster is always overflowing with books, books that you're not allowed to take.
Germany is a lot more conservative than Denmark, so I wouldn't be surprised if they where more reluctant to throw out books. On the other hand, other than myself, how many people really want to read random novels from the 1970s or a 140 year old book on economics, telling you that Trump is wrong about tariffs?
Maybe with the advent of LLMs, old books will get a resurgence. If a book is printed in the 20th century, at least I know it's written by humans.
I mean what are they going to do? Burn them? Oh wait...
> People would put on the streets for free
In the US people put "Little Free Libraries" in their yards. They're all over the place in the Seattle area.