What to do with used technical books?

I gave a few of my dads old books to my daughter who keeps one on her desk as a conversation piece.
 
Call your local engineering school library.
 
If you have a book on programing in COBAL send it to the state of Wisconsin, All of the state computers are in COBAL and they can not find people to make changes when needed.
 
JPMacG said:
There is always eBay. I have purchased many old textbooks there .... Radio Engineering from the 1940s, etc. I am a recently retired microwave engineer, but have held onto my library. I spent too much time with the books to part with them. They are almost family.
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I have a similar problem with "electro-mechanical" texts. Also a home library. I condemn anyone that scraps a book, whether technical or not. Some of my books are real "antiques" on computer works. Others are technical books dating to the 1920s when my uncle was studying engineering. The computer books have paid off when I work on old machines. I used to program in "C", today it is "C++" plus some adders for uSoft. But it's still "C", just some prewritten shortcuts.

Same with the mechanical books my uncle left me. Generators were called "dynamos", and brushes were real brass(?) brushes. They have paid off when I was repairing old equipment without any spare parts. The ones I made might not last as long, but they worked at the time and kept the job going.

I have a few freinds that pursue similar fields of interest. Most are younger than me and stand to "inherit" my library. After I'm dead, while I'm alive and can still read them, I do. FORTRAN and COBOL are both dead languages that aren't really dead, just living low profiles. Just remember, schools don't teach computers, they teach "WinDoze" users. Not even in the same universe. . .

.
 
Re: Cobol books. None. But I do have a couple of Fortran books. I'm keeping one out of nostalgia.
 
Seriously, drive around with a box of books and every time you see one of those little free libraries put in two or three of them.

Those things are full of worthless books that nobody’s going to learn anything from.

Some future engineer will thank you.

John
 
Reddinr said:
A little off topic but I thought this group may have some ideas.

So I'm in the middle of gradually retiring and I'm cleaning out my electronics engineering office. I have a many dozen technical books I've collected over the years and I need to get rid of many of them. I have anything from quality control to engineering management to circuits design to software development to running a business. These are not college text books but ones I've acquired over the years.

My local library doesn't want them as technical books have a limited audience and they just have to shuffle them around.
Goodwill will take them but I'm afraid I'm just making them pay for disposing a good portion of them.
A nearby used book shop doesn't want technical books.

>> Any ideas? How did you deal with your book collection? <<

Some random examples
Juran's Quality Control Handbook
Nolo's "Corporate Records" and "Patent it Yourself", fairly recent
Statecharts in C/C++
Transients in Power Systems
American Electrician's Handbook
Printed Circuits Design
Various books on Linux and Embedded Linux
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Have you reached out to local Career and Technical High Schools near you to see if they could be used in some of their programs?
 
I did try to call a couple of the smaller tech. schools in the area but no response. Tough getting to some one these days. Many are working remotely.
 
I know it's some effort on your part with little/no return, but I hate to see books get disposed of too. (I have a big box of FIL's military history books here that is kinda the same situation..) How about posting a pic of the shelf of books, with spines/titles showing, to the group here to see if anybody is interested in any?
 
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