Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/19/dot-org-kinda-guy.html
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The LFL “news” around my town is that people are upset because someone is taking all the books and not putting any back.
This happened within a week this summer after several years of having a good rotation of books in all of them. Now, nobody wants to re-stock them because they think someone is taking them to sell them.
They want to call the Police, but can’t figure out what the crime is because the books are Free.
Indeed, wypipo hate it when you do the wrong thing with their gifts.
It’s been my assumption that was only possible for the Little Free Libraries to become a thing once books were devalued enough that people were willing to just give them away and the chance of people just “stealing” from them to re-sell them became low.
I used to work in a used book store that bought books, and one woman would frequently come in with a pile of low value books she wanted to sell. She was just taking them from places like the “take one, leave one” pile of books at her apartment complex. It only takes a few people to abuse social contracts to ruin it for everybody.
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Somebody put three Playboy magazines in my neighborhood’s LFL recently. The eight-year-old me would have loved this. As a kid, my only source of nudie mags came from occasionally finding one in the woods.
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Change it to the “Take one, leave one of equal value” Library or some such. My local public library still is called the “[City Name] Free Library” but that doesn’t mean you get to just take all of their books.
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There are probably 4 of these within a six block radius of our house: one of many things that made us feel very welcome in this neighborhood when we moved it. They’ve been particularly useful for finding new books for our toddler.
Hey, we only read him the articles.
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We’ve got one that we stock with comics and graphic novels and other fine reads. I met Todd a few years ago–a genuinely kind and compassionate dude who struggled with dyslexia and knew the value of reading. He will be missed.
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'Round these parts the difficulty is that they get filled with religious tracts.
Yeah, some people might find those things comforting though. I remember some years ago driving on a lengthy solo road trip being absolutely depressed about my life. I was going through rural Ohio and the only radio station I could find was some soft-spoken preacher talking about the Sermon on the Mount. After a few minutes it started to boost my spirits a bit.
Would it be wrong to envision a columbarium equivalent of a Little Free Library? 
How… how on earth would you go about making giving books away for free into a for profit enterprise??? The universe does not contain enough faces and palms to express my degree of facepalm.
Pretty easy, actually. The cheapest fully built, unpainted “Little Free Library” is $300 from littlefreelibrary.org, and the mounting post is an additional $65. A random starter set of used books included free, but only while supplies last.
If you build your own Little Free Library and want to be on the official map, you have to pay for an official charter number on an engraved sign, for $40.
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LFL may have started with good intentions, yet they are happy to threaten legal action if the garage-shop maker of “Free Libraries” in my city doesn’t remove the word “Free” or “Library” from his advertising.
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Indeed, wypipo hate it when you do the wrong thing with their gifts.
Yeah. Being angry at people who abuse a system for sharing things by taking them to make money w/o giving back is a real “wypipo” thing alright…
Seizing my chance to be that guy:
This quote is by the other Martin Luther.
You know, born 1483-11-10, died 1546-02-18.
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