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.
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.
For that amount you can get 20-30 used books at a library sale to stock your little library.
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.
I wish there was more of this. I'd actually like to put a bench in my front yard, facing the sidewalk – unfortunately people would use it to congregate and drink. But then, so it goes – there are other people near me who wouldn't have that problem, because these problems are typically block-by-block. For some reason my yard appears like a perfectly good drinking spot, I'm not sure why, but I am very aware of it.
When benches are put in by the city, the person who makes that decision is not at all aware of these specific issues. They don't live with the result of the infrastructure they create. So we have another public bench near us that causes problems. Or often there are no benches available because they are seen as a nuisance, or the public space is rendered hostile in some fashion to discourage loiterers, which simultaneously discourages all enjoyment. These are the crude choices cities make because the people planning aren't intimately involved with the specific environments they are affecting.
(If I ever do something with the hill in my front yard I think I'd like to install a slide. I think that would be enjoyed but not abused. And if I'm wrong I'll have to figure out myself how to fix it)
It's a great idea, and a fun project for the community.
It seemed quite popular, with a few people sitting on the benches next to it reading (books presumably from the Book Booth)
