Computer books are becoming obsolete at a faster and faster rate. The web made programming language reference books pretty obsolete at least 10 or 15 years ago, because instead of paying money for a thousand-page volume that explains every possible parameter of every function call in a given programming language, you could find the explanations online for free. These explanations often came from the sponsors of the language itself, who updated this documentation each time they updated the language.

LLM-backed chatbots are making user guides and tutorials less and less worth the money when you consider that you’re paying for something that will be out of date after the book’s subject goes through a few upgrades. Self-help author Tim Ferris recently asked Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? He makes a good argument that well-planned, well-execute tutorials will still find an audience, but of course I am biased.

My wife and I recently moved from a larger house to a smaller house, and a lot of books had to go. I hate to throw them in the garbage, but if Internet-related technology has made so many computer books obsolete, what can we do with them? We can give them to people who have no access to the Internet and want to improve job skills: we can give them to incarcerated people.

I could list many organizations that will accept your books and bring them to prisons, but — assuming that you don’t want to spend money shipping those big heavy reference books to these organizations (although the Prison Books Program in Quincy, Massachusetts does provide an address for this) — you may be able to find a local place where you can drop them off. The American Library Association has a Resource Guide overview of some U.S. places that can help.

The Quincy Prison Books Program also lists organizations around the United States that that gather books for delivery to prisons. I suggest, especially if you are outside of the U.S., that you try a web search on the name of a local city and the phrase “donate books to prisons” translated to the language of the relevant city if necessary. Doing this with “Chicago” led me to Chicago Books to Women in Prison, and other places; Washington DC has DC Books to Prisoners; Durham, North Carolina has Prison Books Collective. I tried “London” and found Give a Book and other organizations.

In my own city I have donated a lot of books to Books Behind Bars – Virginia. Most of the libraries around here accept any book donations, even if it’s just to resell the books to raise money, but I found that one particular branch would route books to the Books Behind Bars program if you labeled the boxes as being for that.

So you might have to do a little research, but it’s worth it: more room on your bookshelves and more job skill opportunities for people who really, really need it and have minimal if any access to the Internet that we wrongly assume is so ubiquitous.

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