The End of Books: A Dumpster Behind the University Library

Yale Review / Hacker News·low signal

Sheila Liming's Yale Review essay on the disappearance of physical books drew an outsized 170 points and 168 comments on Hacker News, with much of the thread connecting library deaccessioning to AI-era shifts in how knowledge is stored, searched, and consumed. The discussion is a cultural counterweight to AI optimism, probing what's lost as text moves from shelves to LLM context windows. Relevant as a signal of practitioner reflection on AI's effect on reading and knowledge.