Sounds like a great idea until the city zoning board comes to tear it down. http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/19/why-we-need-government-to-...
Little Free Library
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Little Free Library
#22Sounds like a great idea until the city zoning board comes to tear it down. http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/19/why-we-need-government-to-...
"Leawood said it has received two complaints about Spencer Collins' library."
Re: Little Free Library
#23"There is also a one-time payment of $34.95 per Library to receive a Steward’s Packet of support materials and 1 official charter sign and number for your Library."
For that amount you can get 20-30 used books at a library sale to stock your little library.
Re: Little Free Library
#24I've watched the evolution of a few of these things. My experience is that even if people aren't trying to be jerks then the quality of books inevitably goes down over time as people take the things they find interesting and replace them with things they find less interesting. You might think that since different people find different things interesting that this might work out in the end, but it doesn't seem to.
Add to this the fact that some people are just jerks and will take books without replacing them, plus a bunch of people who see this as an opportunity to promote either their self-published books or their own political opinions, and you get a bookshelf rapidly being denuded of popular books and filled up with political tracts, dated "how to" books and obscure genre novels from the 1970s.
Compare this to, say, an ordinary public library, which allows you to freely borrow any one of many thousands of well-catalogued books as long as you return it in a few weeks.
Re: Little Free Library
#25was downvoted for my previous comment, let me clarify, books are a known vector for bed bugs. libraries are facing this problem all over. a friend of mine worked at the columbia university library and had to go through freezing process on returned books.
all i'm saying is, books cost hardly anything, libraries have ebooks. why expose yourself to this problem?
google it if you do not believe me.
Re: Little Free Library
#26There's one on my corner. It's also an Ingress portal. :) I stock it with kids books, mostly. And of course keep it shielded.
Re: Little Free Library
#27I've watched the evolution of a few of these things. My experience is that even if people aren't trying to be jerks then the quality of books inevitably goes down over time as people take the things they find interesting and replace them with things they find less interesting. You might think that since different people find different things interesting that this might work out in the end, but it doesn't seem to. Add…
So you're saying that curation can triumph over crowdsourcing.
Re: Little Free Library
#28I've watched the evolution of a few of these things. My experience is that even if people aren't trying to be jerks then the quality of books inevitably goes down over time as people take the things they find interesting and replace them with things they find less interesting. You might think that since different people find different things interesting that this might work out in the end, but it doesn't seem to. Add…
So you're saying that curation can triumph over crowdsourcing.
Well, public libraries also need funding in order to do their curation.
Re: Little Free Library
#29"There is also a one-time payment of $34.95 per Library to receive a Steward’s Packet of support materials and 1 official charter sign and number for your Library." For that amount you can get 20-30 used books at a library sale to stock your little library.
I buy all my used books at goodwill. Its cheap and they always have all the popular books.
Re: Little Free Library
#30I saw something similar when I was Berlin, by the Grunewald S-Bahn station. There is a memorial platform of the deportation of Jews from Berlin and the area around the city called Track 17 (German: Gleis 17) and nearby the station entrance there's a converted phone booth (in bright "happy" colors) with books on the history and surrounding stories.
It seemed quite popular, with a few people sitting on the benches next to it reading (books presumably from the Book Booth)