Little Free Library

I had my handyman build one of these in front of our house. Also, I make a hobby of biking around to circulate books between different little free libraries in my extended neighborhood. I've found some amazing books over the years, things that were very different from my typical prior experience of books. I like this aspect, that it can be eye opening. Each little free library has it's own style of books. Some are better at handling magazines. Some…

We have a Little Free Library (https://www.instagram.com/paintedladieslibrary/) that we painted/decorated to look like our house using a laser cutter and a lot of wood glue to mimic the decorative woodwork. Recently I installed a door sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi to collect analytics on how often people open it and how long they browse for. In the past week, it has been opened around 200 times with an average browse time of just over a minute.

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 to this the fact that some…

One of my neighbors tried to get this going. She put out a fancy shelf that looked like a little English telephone booth, and someone stole it. Personally, I thought we'd be better off donating money to our local library, which is walking distance from where she'd installed the bookshelf anyway.