Comment by mrweasel

Every now and then I need to go to the recycling station here in Denmark. They have a special container/dumpster just for books. The second hand shops will take a small quantum of books, stores the buy and resell old DVDs, games, records, porn, comics and what-not, no longer buy books as there's no profit in second hand books. The dumpster is always overflowing with books, books that you're not allowed to take.

Germany is a lot more conservative than Denmark, so I wouldn't be surprised if they where more reluctant to throw out books. On the other hand, other than myself, how many people really want to read random novels from the 1970s or a 140 year old book on economics, telling you that Trump is wrong about tariffs?

Maybe with the advent of LLMs, old books will get a resurgence. If a book is printed in the 20th century, at least I know it's written by humans.