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_m_ptoday at 1:24 PM3 repliesview on HN

Librarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding":

https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...


Replies

oliwarnertoday at 1:36 PM

This is a bizarre comparison.

Weeding is the natural process of disposing of less-demand books. Like the rest of us, libraries operate in finite space, so if they want new books, they have to remove ones their users aren't using. Most libraries will try to sell books before disposing of them in any destructive way.

What similarities do you see here?

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emddudleytoday at 1:30 PM

Libraries are not archives, and weeding does not mean destruction.

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malfisttoday at 1:30 PM

This is really dishonest framing, unless you really, honestly can't tell a difference between pulping a mass market paperback romance novel that there's 3 million of in circulation, and shredding an 18th century botanical text that there's only 2 copies of in existence.

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