|
|
|
|
|
|
by afafsd
4314 days ago
|
|
|
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 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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5TJH5hmRE8