My sister runs a "Little Library" and her solution has been to throw money at it --- uninteresting/objectionable books are removed and books which she wants to distribute (often copies of books we remember fondly from childhood) are placed there.
In my town we banded together with the town library to cycle through books that are otherwise going to be thrown out into the little libraries we have. Someone (me) just had to build a backyard shed big enough to store the “stock” to free up the big library and the librarians are more than happy to chip in a few hours a month to manage it (we have a vibe coded app that integrates with their system to make it easy). Since the library prefilters their collection for us, the vast majority of the books were good to great, they just hadn’t been checked out in a long time.
It ended up saving a whole collection of rare books about obscure SoCal history that were going to be thrown away, because someone got interested in a book from a little library and started checking them out for the first time in years.
As much as I hate it, when discarding books, libraries really should have a policy of checking values/quantity of used copies for sale, and anything past a certain threshold or which they cannot find a copy of for sale, should be put up for sale.
I built a little free library a couple years ago. There are definitely people who drop their old crappy books. A good little free librarian treats it like a garden, pruning the weeds and letting the good stuff grow. I also like to seed it occasionally with some of my old favorites that I want someone else to enjoy. It tends to sort of perpetuate itself. People put less junk in there if there is already quality stuff.
Honestly, if each little library was curated by the owner, it would be amazing - even if I don't care about grannie's selection of knitting guides from the 1950s or old man bob's collection of microwave cookbooks from the 60s, it would be so much fun to SEE them as opposed to each one being a near-mirror of every other one.
Darn it, now I almost want to start a competitor to the LFLs hehe.
My mom was cleaning the house and gave me a tote filled with books I had left at home when I moved out. So I drove around and stuffed all my Goosebumps and Animorphs books into all the little libraries I knew about in my area. I hope some kids had as much fun reading them as I did when I was their age.
Free membership which accumulates points. These can be spent on books. Books are priced in points according to a metric (TBD). Bad books are 0 points. You can also get points by bringing in good books.
(It's like uh some kind of currency based barter dude ;) )
Thanks to the author, I now have a whole lot of destinations to walk around town. I will take some photos of every library and upload to the app soon too!
The first thing I noticed: do people like wet books? The way a lot of those libraries are designed, all the books are going to be ruined at the first rainstorm.
The Library of Congress doesn't keep a copy of everything. It doesn't even try. I was shocked to learn this, as a child growing up I had been told the Library of Congress kept a copy of everything.
I have lots of old books that aren’t very good. That I can’t give away. What do I do with them? I have this strange taboo feeling about destroying books, even bad ones!
That is what those book corners are for. In Germany a lot of old public phone cells have been repurposed for that. Just don't overload them and also consider taking some books that interest you. Somehow it regulates and I guess someone also throws away stuff from time to time. I actually would not consider many of those listed in the OP 'libraries' because I rarely see books returning. There are more books exchanges. I liked the idea of bookcrossing.com that gives more value to the books (I never got any ping back though). There are also book resellers (some buy per weight, some let you estimate price by ISBN scanning before sending them)
They're worthless, sadly. You can make a free library-type thing, but nobody wants them.
The best use is to glue the pages together (one set of about 20 with the cover, one set of 20 with the back cover, and then the rest). Put it on a bench/vice and use a jigsaw to cut open the center portion, and then glue the back section to the hole you now have, and now you have a book you can hide something in.
You can try to find out or estimate how many copies there were. If there are tens of thousands, it may make you feel less bad about tossing them. If people want them, they can find them and it's not necessarily your responsibility. For many books the world's need for them really diminished in relation to what has been mass-printed at one time: popular fiction like airport books, self-help type etc.
Second hand bookstores often buy. You can offer your books to them. Some they won't want, but might accept as a donation along with those that have monetary value to them. In reality, they have similar constraints of space and expected time to when someone will purchase (which could be years for even semi-known books). People have this romantic view about books, but if you want to hold any kind of personal library and don't have a freaking villa, you have to learn to be pragmatic. Even if you don't have a lot of books, get ones that you would read.
Yeah, I wish that libraries would have the funding for a "last copy" system where at least one copy of every book which was ever in their system was kept in storage --- yes, there are systems such as the Library of Congress to serve as book repositories, but they don't loan, and driving there for research is a pain.
Donate them to Better World Books or some similar group?
If you hate them, that's all the more reason to do a destructive scan on them and upload them somewhere. If you don't care about the book, you can make a beautiful copy, and somebody wants to read it. Even if it's just to research religious fanatics around the Boulder, CO area who were in a business conflict with someone from the Jones family. They might be interesting because of who published them, because one has a list in an appendix of the businesses in downtown BFE from 1982, or because the grandson of the author became president of Chile.
I want to say that you don't know what books are worth reading until after at least 1000 years, but actually all books are worth reading after 1000 years. They become tsukumogami, somehow old and wise even if they started dumb. The list of the garbage from the 16th and 17th century I've spent all day reading that is exactly their equivalent of the self-published AI slop novel is embarrassingly long.
If there are already good pirated copies of it, cut the spines anyway and you can use the pages for fill when you're packing things. Lots of O'Reilly in my life went that way.
edit: the problem is having access to a indy print shop that will scan them for you (it only takes a few minutes, but the machine is huge and expensive.) Most of them are closed down and have been replaced with chains. I was spoiled for a while working with one.
I believe libraries should take all books. Then they can turn them into confetti if they want. In practice, of course, they are not interested at all. If they did they might find some interesting gems when someone passes away or similar to make up for it.
Just toss them. Make a real assessment on their quality or worth and if you think it’s very unlikely someone in your immediate community would not only pick it up but actually read it, toss them.
This is a nice idea but a lot of the OSM tiles show as blocked due to lack of a Referer.
same here.
Most of the books in these community libraries are really crappy. I would assume that people:
a. Toss out books at home they don't like and bring them to these libraries
b. Take interesting books from the libraries, and leave the bad ones
Any ideas on how to improve that?
My sister runs a "Little Library" and her solution has been to throw money at it --- uninteresting/objectionable books are removed and books which she wants to distribute (often copies of books we remember fondly from childhood) are placed there.
In my town we banded together with the town library to cycle through books that are otherwise going to be thrown out into the little libraries we have. Someone (me) just had to build a backyard shed big enough to store the “stock” to free up the big library and the librarians are more than happy to chip in a few hours a month to manage it (we have a vibe coded app that integrates with their system to make it easy). Since the library prefilters their collection for us, the vast majority of the books were good to great, they just hadn’t been checked out in a long time.
It ended up saving a whole collection of rare books about obscure SoCal history that were going to be thrown away, because someone got interested in a book from a little library and started checking them out for the first time in years.
As much as I hate it, when discarding books, libraries really should have a policy of checking values/quantity of used copies for sale, and anything past a certain threshold or which they cannot find a copy of for sale, should be put up for sale.
I built a little free library a couple years ago. There are definitely people who drop their old crappy books. A good little free librarian treats it like a garden, pruning the weeds and letting the good stuff grow. I also like to seed it occasionally with some of my old favorites that I want someone else to enjoy. It tends to sort of perpetuate itself. People put less junk in there if there is already quality stuff.
The vast majority of books are crap.
The little libraries have a cross-section of crap (verified by comparing what you find there with Goodwill / other sources).
If you want a good one you'd have to set up your own and aggressively curate it.
I feel something like 90% of all books purchased each year are bibles, cookbooks, or self-help.
> If you want a good one you'd have to set up your own and aggressively curate it
Expect a community library with only books on homotopy type theory and quantum computing soon!
Honestly, if each little library was curated by the owner, it would be amazing - even if I don't care about grannie's selection of knitting guides from the 1950s or old man bob's collection of microwave cookbooks from the 60s, it would be so much fun to SEE them as opposed to each one being a near-mirror of every other one.
Darn it, now I almost want to start a competitor to the LFLs hehe.
My mom was cleaning the house and gave me a tote filled with books I had left at home when I moved out. So I drove around and stuffed all my Goosebumps and Animorphs books into all the little libraries I knew about in my area. I hope some kids had as much fun reading them as I did when I was their age.
If you see a library that's full, find the worst book, walk a ways, and throw it away.
If people own a book they probably liked it at some point.
Or they are passing on an unwanted gift.
Free membership which accumulates points. These can be spent on books. Books are priced in points according to a metric (TBD). Bad books are 0 points. You can also get points by bringing in good books.
(It's like uh some kind of currency based barter dude ;) )
It sounds like physical bittorrent
Thanks to the author, I now have a whole lot of destinations to walk around town. I will take some photos of every library and upload to the app soon too!
You can also contribute to OpenStreetMap instead - they have bookcases too
You might see if you can incorporate the data from https://littlefreelibrary.org/map/ as well
That site runs by charging a fee for promotion/maintenance of the database/marketing.
And they have a restrictive license. Not gonna happen
Nice idea i even found on my city in Sweden! How to you get the data for those exchange spots? Maybe it was in the website and i missed it
I think they have their own database. TBH, we'd better all contribute to OpenStreetMap, it's why I made https://mapcomplete.org/bookcases.html?
The first thing I noticed: do people like wet books? The way a lot of those libraries are designed, all the books are going to be ruined at the first rainstorm.
The Library of Congress doesn't keep a copy of everything. It doesn't even try. I was shocked to learn this, as a child growing up I had been told the Library of Congress kept a copy of everything.
The ones in Canada usually have sloped roofs to block rain. It's enough.
Indoor ones obviously don't need it.
I have lots of old books that aren’t very good. That I can’t give away. What do I do with them? I have this strange taboo feeling about destroying books, even bad ones!
That is what those book corners are for. In Germany a lot of old public phone cells have been repurposed for that. Just don't overload them and also consider taking some books that interest you. Somehow it regulates and I guess someone also throws away stuff from time to time. I actually would not consider many of those listed in the OP 'libraries' because I rarely see books returning. There are more books exchanges. I liked the idea of bookcrossing.com that gives more value to the books (I never got any ping back though). There are also book resellers (some buy per weight, some let you estimate price by ISBN scanning before sending them)
They're worthless, sadly. You can make a free library-type thing, but nobody wants them.
The best use is to glue the pages together (one set of about 20 with the cover, one set of 20 with the back cover, and then the rest). Put it on a bench/vice and use a jigsaw to cut open the center portion, and then glue the back section to the hole you now have, and now you have a book you can hide something in.
Or just burn them.
I had considered this. Up cycling them as eco bricks but that’s nearly as destructive as burning. Life would be so much easier if I had no qualms.
You can try to find out or estimate how many copies there were. If there are tens of thousands, it may make you feel less bad about tossing them. If people want them, they can find them and it's not necessarily your responsibility. For many books the world's need for them really diminished in relation to what has been mass-printed at one time: popular fiction like airport books, self-help type etc.
Second hand bookstores often buy. You can offer your books to them. Some they won't want, but might accept as a donation along with those that have monetary value to them. In reality, they have similar constraints of space and expected time to when someone will purchase (which could be years for even semi-known books). People have this romantic view about books, but if you want to hold any kind of personal library and don't have a freaking villa, you have to learn to be pragmatic. Even if you don't have a lot of books, get ones that you would read.
> If there are tens of thousands, it may make you feel less bad about tossing them.
That’s a great point.
It doesn’t eliminate the problem but it helps break it up a bit, which is definitely helpful.
You could digitize them if you think you (or your family/friends/etc.) would read them: https://www.diybookscanner.org/
(If any are public domain, consider scanning them and uploading to archive.org!)
That’s no good to me. It’s the physical volumes I need to get rid of. I couldn’t give a fiddlers about what’s in them
Yeah, I wish that libraries would have the funding for a "last copy" system where at least one copy of every book which was ever in their system was kept in storage --- yes, there are systems such as the Library of Congress to serve as book repositories, but they don't loan, and driving there for research is a pain.
Donate them to Better World Books or some similar group?
Donate them to free libraries or charity shops. Oxfam has bookshops and they often have old books.
If you hate them, that's all the more reason to do a destructive scan on them and upload them somewhere. If you don't care about the book, you can make a beautiful copy, and somebody wants to read it. Even if it's just to research religious fanatics around the Boulder, CO area who were in a business conflict with someone from the Jones family. They might be interesting because of who published them, because one has a list in an appendix of the businesses in downtown BFE from 1982, or because the grandson of the author became president of Chile.
I want to say that you don't know what books are worth reading until after at least 1000 years, but actually all books are worth reading after 1000 years. They become tsukumogami, somehow old and wise even if they started dumb. The list of the garbage from the 16th and 17th century I've spent all day reading that is exactly their equivalent of the self-published AI slop novel is embarrassingly long.
If there are already good pirated copies of it, cut the spines anyway and you can use the pages for fill when you're packing things. Lots of O'Reilly in my life went that way.
edit: the problem is having access to a indy print shop that will scan them for you (it only takes a few minutes, but the machine is huge and expensive.) Most of them are closed down and have been replaced with chains. I was spoiled for a while working with one.
I believe libraries should take all books. Then they can turn them into confetti if they want. In practice, of course, they are not interested at all. If they did they might find some interesting gems when someone passes away or similar to make up for it.
Just toss them. Make a real assessment on their quality or worth and if you think it’s very unlikely someone in your immediate community would not only pick it up but actually read it, toss them.