Last week I bought online a book that I consider fundamental for my research area. Reading most of that book and doing the exercises in it was actually my first assignment in my PhD studies. I only bought it now because during my PhD I used my supervisor's copy of the book. The book is quite old now (1989) and it is no longer printed, so I bought a used copy through Amazon.
For some reason, I expected a book used by some individual who found it useless for his own purposes. To my surprise, the copy I bought was actually sold by a university, the University of Westminster in London. Apart from a huge "Withdrawn" stamp in its first page, the book is in perfect state. I found it strange that a university would be willing to sell a book that is a major reference in its area. Why a university library would need to sell a book? The university has an informatics department so there might be people interested in it. Perhaps they had more copies than those needed, but I thought that in those cases libraries would try some exchange with other libraries.
It appears so wrong to me that libraries would accept to sell their books, whatever their motivations could be. It feels as if they would be neglecting the knowledge contained in them. Oddly enough, in this particular circumstance I am lucky, as I was able to obtain a copy of a book that is out of print, but still it feels a bit strange.
