Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

smokel

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?

View on HN

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

With the difference that with time you get free credit automatically. Perhaps somewhat comparable to optimistic unchoking in BitTorrent :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com