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was 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.
A while back, a local non-profit here in Flint, MI held a campaign and got a handful of these put up. It is amazing that, in a city where anything not bolted down is fair game for theft, these Little Free Libraries are (afaik) always stocked, and I have never heard any stories of people finding their LFL empty one morning. It does restore a little faith in humanity.
I'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…
This topic of book quality degradation or opinionated materials added. He mentioned that while people do put in weird books or those with an agenda, you do curate your own library. More often than not, people will quit putting in junk after you clear them out a couple times.
A lot of times where there is an unregulated shelf for book trading (in hostels, bnb's, some community type centers) you do end up with low quality discards. Somebody needs to be responsible to weed out junk and add make additional books available.
The nice thing about it is you can curate it to your interests or whatever is relevant to your community. In the talk he mentions a cooking based library with a herb garden that you can also trim for the recipes. He also talks about ones based around children's books and interests.
It is in no way a 'set it and forget it' type of project. Some work in curating the materials is required.