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Comment by liontwist | Hacker News Reader

> students are reading much less than they used to, and far less in the way of physical books

There is the answer. It's really hard to justify when usage is so low.

I am not under the illusion that "everything is on the internet". The best information is in books. But it's hard to argue University libraries aren't mostly study areas, and the books are symbolic. I wouldn't be surprised if its budget is already under "alumni outreach".

This is perhaps another symptom of the weird mix of undergrad, with a government research institution attached.

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I agree they are symbolic, but I believe we should see them as a symbol of how much knowledge has been created that yet remains potentially untapped and unexplored.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antili...

I'm sure people would make an argument to the effect that writing that has existed for X years or decades would have already been tapped if it was of any value, and I would respond by saying many publications make little impact on their contemporaries only to be discovered later to have been ahead of their time.

If we start using "engagement" as a metric for the retention of writing, then knowledge will suffer under the tyranny of the majority. Instead I think the most unread books in a library should be celebrated and promoted by the librarians for the sake of having been unread, even if it ends up being kind of funny how bad they are.

Sounds like a noble project. Why does each University need to do that though?

> many publications make little impact on their contemporaries only to be discovered later to have been ahead of their time.

I would say this is evidence that books do not represent a "infinitely growing body of human knowledge". Knowledge is only alive in the people using it.

“If we start using "engagement" as a metric for the retention of writing, then knowledge will suffer under the tyranny of the majority.”

Wow, that is so well written.

It summarizes many of the problems of today and the disappointing aspects of technological effort and its applications.

Students do read, it's just that they prefer to burn their energy on course textbooks, which libraries have in very low supply. It's very hard to be a student that avoids buying books and instead borrows their way through university.

Nearly impossible. Text books at the library get recalled constantly.

Space really isn’t that scarce.

Library books solely as interior design is still better than 99% of the decorative architecture campuses are covered in that use up orders of magnitude more space.

What is funny is that the background one sees on remote interviews on TV is nearly always a bookshelf. The books are carefully curated to give the right impression to the viewer. I wonder if the person had actually read them, or it is just window decoration.

One person had the books he'd authored lined up on his shelf.

Sadly, I rarely am able to read the titles on the spines. A bit too out of focus.

There's a great pic of Werner von Braun in his office, with the inevitable bookshelf behind him. I was able to read some of the titles, and looked them up. Classic rocket books! The ultimate nerd bookshelf.

I wonder what is on Elon's bookshelf!

> What is funny is that the background one sees on remote interviews on TV is nearly always a bookshelf. The books are carefully curated to give the right impression to the viewer. I wonder if the person had actually read them, or it is just window decoration.

There are rental bookshelves available for decorative or studio purposes actually, which are purely put together to give the impression of erudition. When doing scholarly photoshoots, posing in front of the office bookshelf is a common choice.

Just for laughs, I used a photo of a bookshelf as my zoom background for a while.

Haha...I often don't pay attention to the interview itself and spend the entire time bothering my wife with questions like, 'I wonder why they picked that book/picture/background?'

They are decorations. Very common for lawyers and finance pros to have similar styles for sales purposes.

Elons brand isn’t really being a historian or an academic guy. I don’t think he reads and I don’t think he pretends to. Just focus on the projects.

> I don’t think he reads

I've read that he's read "Rocketeers" by Belfiore, along with "Rocket Propulsion Elements" and "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics".

I have all three. The latter two are very non-trivial.

Musk is extremely well informed about technology. The idea that he doesn't read is not compelling.

> Musk is extremely well informed about technology

Yes. That’s different than reading. I’m not ascribing moral value either way.

One doesn't become well-informed without reading.

I recall debating a historical point with a person who would send me cites in the form of TikTok clips. Coincidentally, I have two entire books on the subject, by two accomplished historians. Both books demolished all of his points.

Just for fun, compare a transcript of the movie "Oppenheimer" with the book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". You're looking at a transcript of the movie of a few pages vs a 750 page small print tome. There's no way "Oppenheimer" makes one well informed about the Manhattan Project.

If you are arguing reading books is the only way someone can learn about a topic I disagree.

I wonder what's on Jeff Bezos' bookshelf. He leans more into the history.

https://www.bezosexpeditions.com/updates.html

The cost for universities is the librarians, (and journal subscriptions?) not the books.

Think of what a librarian could be today in the context of LLMs — there are completely different ways of accessing and organizing information — ways that will continually evolve in next few years.

In Europe it is legal to scan library books and use the contents with ML, per EU directive.

Even back in 2004 University libraries were under-utilized. I can only imagine they now look like ghost towns.

In 201X in at university they were used, but mostly as study areas.

Still the case in 2025, at least at all the universities I frequent.

I like reading through the oldest books in the collections and ones related to my field / hobbies, but other than that, I don't know of anyone who actually checks out books from the archives.

They've essentially become glorified quiet lobby areas that off-campus commuters use as a common space between classes.

> But it's hard to argue University libraries aren't mostly study areas

That's fine. For good study areas, you end up with a lot of dead space, anyway, which might as well be filled with books.

What sucks is libraries that are both passively and actively hostile to people trying to read and study.

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