[Toadsoup]

Todd Bol of Little Free Library gave a talk at TEDxFargo [1] last year. After the event I had the opportunity to chat with him a bit.

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