Little free libraries and book boxes: what they are, how they work and where to find them
A public box where anyone can leave a book and anyone can take one: no sign-up, no due date, nobody to ask. How it works, what to put in and what to keep out, where to take the books you no longer read, and how many boxes there are near you.
A little free library is a public box full of books: a wooden cabinet on a post, a cupboard in a courtyard, an old phone box, a shelf in a building's lobby or a station waiting room. The rule is a single one, and it is usually written on the door: take a book, leave a book. Nothing to pay, nothing to reserve, nothing to bring back. What is inside belongs to whoever walks by.
They have existed for decades under different names and have multiplied in recent years: Germany and France each have several thousand mapped on OpenStreetMap, Italy more than eight hundred (September 2026). This guide explains how they work, what to put in and what not to, where to take the books you no longer read, and says — city by city — how many there are, with numbers taken from our map and refreshed every day.
Little free library, book box, bookcrossing: the names and the differences
The same box goes by many names, and they are not quite synonyms.
- Little Free Library is the American name, born in 2009 in Wisconsin from a schoolhouse-shaped box built in memory of a teacher. It is also a registered network: the "official" boxes carry a plaque with a number, but the model has been copied everywhere and today the phrase means any neighbourhood book box.
- Book box, book exchange box, community bookshelf, public bookcase (the name OpenStreetMap uses): the same thing said in different ways. In German it is the offener Bücherschrank, in French the boîte à livres.
- Bookcrossing is a practice, not an object: you leave a book in a public place — a bench, a café, a train — with a label and a code, hoping whoever finds it registers it and sends it travelling again. Boxes are the most natural place to do it, but a "released" book can be anywhere.
- Building library or shared shelf: the indoor version, in a hallway or an office. Same rule, smaller public.
On this map all of these are a single kind of point, the book box, because for the person walking by they work the same way. Libraries are a different kind, and we come to them below: they lend, so they want the books back.
How a book box works
The physical gesture is everything: open the door, look, take what catches your eye, maybe leave something. No website, no app, no account is needed — that is the box's great quality, and it is worth protecting. What a website can add is knowing where the boxes are and what is inside right now, the two things a wooden box cannot say for itself.
The unwritten rule is that whoever takes, sooner or later, leaves. It is not an obligation and nobody enforces it; it is what keeps a box alive. A box everyone takes from and nobody feeds is empty within a month; one where people leave books worth reading stays full for years.
What to leave (and what not to)
One rule, valid everywhere: a book you would hand to a friend. Novels, essays, children's books, comics, guides that are still current. In good condition: a missing page or a torn cover condemns it to stay there forever.
Not to leave: twenty-year-old computer manuals, part-work encyclopaedias, out-of-date textbooks, magazines, mouldy or water-damaged books, the three copies of a title nobody wanted at the jumble sale. A box fills up with unsellable junk in two months if the neighbourhood mistakes it for a bin, and from then on nobody looks inside. If you are unsure which books actually circulate, we go through it in what to put on a shared shelf.
Two things never to do
Do not empty a box to resell its contents. It happens — box stamps turn up on market stalls — and it is the fastest way to make a box disappear from a neighbourhood: whoever put it there stops caring for it. And do not leave anything that is not a book: flyers, objects, business cards, food. It is a library, a small one, not a notice board.
How many little free libraries are there
The points on our map come from OpenStreetMap, where volunteers all over the world mark the boxes and libraries they come across, and we refresh them every month. Today the table holds 48,020 book boxes and 112,865 libraries open to the public. These are the mapped points, not all the ones that exist: where nobody has mapped, the box is there all the same, but it does not show here — which is why you can report the one that is missing.
City by city, within ten kilometres of the centre. The numbers update on their own; the names are the ones people gave the boxes on OpenStreetMap; a name leads to the point's page when that page has something to tell, a description or a recently left book.
In Europe
| City | Book boxes | Libraries | A few named boxes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin | 81 | 99 | Bücherzelle, Kinderbücherbox, werk |
| Paris | 532 | 281 | La bibliothèque de rue du quartier latin, Boîte à lire, Le Nid |
| London | 46 | 176 | Free Library, Little Free Library, Leighton Road Community Book Swap |
| Vienna | 101 | 146 | OBCZ, Bücherkasten, Offenes Bücherrad |
| Zurich | 73 | 96 | THE BOOK, Bücherkabine, Tauschbibliothek |
| Munich | 92 | 98 | Offener Bücherschrank Haidhausen, Kunstbücherschrank, Büchertausch-Zelle |
| Hamburg | 35 | 118 | Bücherbox, Tauschbox Schäferstraße, BücherboxX |
| Madrid | 9 | 108 | Biblioteca Popular de los Jardines de Herrero Palacios, Bibliojardín Opañel, Metroteca |
| Barcelona | 12 | 114 | Bookcrosing, Caixa de lectura del parc |
| Lisbon | 11 | 109 | Bookcrossing, Little Free Library, Ler no Parque |
| Amsterdam | 170 | 45 | Artis boekenkast, Pakboek, Pup's in Birma |
| Brussels | 116 | 107 | Boîte à lire - Boekenbox, Bookswap Salon, Kubox |
| Prague | 90 | 88 | Knihobudka Jana Masaryka, Knihobudka, KnihoBudka |
| Warsaw | 26 | 220 | Sąsiedzka wymiana książek, Biblioteka Plenerowa, Biblioteka Plenerowa |
| Copenhagen | 37 | 56 | Byt Bøger, Bogbytteskabe ved Vesterbro Ungdomsgård, Bryggens bogskab |
In Italy
| City | Book boxes | Libraries | A few named boxes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rome | 12 | 163 | MEDICHINI LEPANTO, MEDICHINI LEX, Libreria del Bosco |
| Milan | 15 | 86 | OBCZ, Piccola Biblioteca Libera, Polimi Bookcrossing |
| Naples | 5 | 27 | — |
| Turin | 10 | 48 | — |
| Palermo | 0 | 10 | — |
| Genoa | 4 | 98 | — |
| Bologna | 7 | 102 | Piccola biblioteca spontanea |
| Florence | 10 | 308 | La piccola libreria degli Angeli del bello |
| Bari | 0 | 20 | — |
| Catania | 9 | 23 | Piazza dei Libri |
| Venice | 8 | 25 | La Casa del Libro |
| Verona | 11 | 19 | CEMS, Piazzale Buccari, Mizzole |
| Padua | 5 | 32 | Il Sigillo Libreria esoterica |
| Trieste | 2 | 102 | — |
| Brescia | 3 | 35 | LIBeRI TUTTI |
| Parma | 1 | 25 | — |
| Modena | 0 | 18 | — |
| Trento | 26 | 41 | OBCZ, Centro Nautico Ekon |
| Bolzano | 1 | 27 | Bibliocabina |
| Bergamo | 2 | 41 | Little Free Library |
| Perugia | 4 | 27 | OBCZ, OBCZ, OBCZ |
| Cagliari | 3 | 33 | — |
| Pisa | 3 | 66 | Bibliocabina |
| Ancona | 0 | 6 | — |
| Lecce | 1 | 7 | Book exchange |
Where to take used books (and where to find free ones)
The question always arrives at the same moment: a move, a bookcase that will not close any more, a parent's house to clear. There are four roads, and they do not exclude each other.
- The nearest book box. For the good books, a few at a time: ten books in a box built for twenty smother it. It is the simplest road and the one that gives most pleasure to whoever comes next.
- The library. Many public libraries accept donations, but ask first: they have criteria (recent editions, good condition, titles they do not already hold) and whoever turns up with three boxes unannounced is often turned away. Some keep a "take one" shelf at the entrance that works exactly like a book box.
- Your neighbours. That is what this site does: you put your books on your shelf, and people within your radius find them and ask you for them. The book stays yours and comes back; if you then want to give it away, you say so. For people who want to keep their books but are happy to see them circulate, it is the right road.
- Giving them to whoever wants them. Schools, hospitals, prisons, care homes, after-school clubs: they almost always accept, almost always after a phone call.
What does not work: the paper recycling bin for books that can still be read, and second-hand stalls for ordinary books — they pay pennies and only for what they can resell. And to find free books the answer is the same list read backwards: boxes, libraries, neighbours.
How to find the nearest book box
Every box and every library on the map has a public page, readable without an account: where it is, what it is called, its opening hours if it has any, and — for boxes — the books someone has recently reported inside. The tables above lead to the named boxes in the main cities.
The full map, with the points next to your neighbours' books, is for signed-in users, and one detail avoids a misunderstanding: the points appear only from a certain zoom level on, the neighbourhood one. Looking at a whole country you see nothing, and that is deliberate — at that distance a hundred and sixty thousand dots say nothing. Zoom in on your area and they appear.
If someone has reported a book inside a box, three buttons on its page help whoever comes next: still there (I saw it, it's there), I took it (I carried it off), couldn't find it (I looked and it wasn't there). It takes two different people not finding a book to remove it from the list: after the first one the book stays, with the note “one person couldn't find it”, and if someone sees it and taps “still there” the note goes away. A report nobody confirms switches itself off after thirty days: a list of books that are no longer there sends people on a wasted trip, and whoever makes it twice stops looking. Whoever takes a book can also put it on their own shelf, so it starts circulating again from their home — or simply keep it, which is a perfectly good answer: a book taken from a box is yours.
Inside the lid of many boxes you will find a sign with a QR code leading to the point's page: it prints from the page itself, on an A4 sheet, and tells passers-by that this box is on a map.
Reporting a box that is missing
If you know one that is not on the map, you add it from Add a book box, with an account. Two things are needed: what kind it is, and where it is. The position comes from your phone if you are standing in front of it, or you drag it on the map; name, address, photo and description are optional, and the photo is more useful than it seems, because a box is recognised at a glance long before it is found by its address.
The report does not appear immediately: we look at it first. A wrong point sends someone to a stranger's doorstep, and once on the map it stays there. If you upload a photo, the GPS coordinates cameras hide inside the file are removed before it is saved: you declare the point's position, not your photo. If you would like the box to appear on OpenStreetMap too, add it there: it arrives here on its own with the next monthly refresh.
And the libraries?
Book boxes are one of the five forms of distributed library: the dedicated guide compares them with the public library, bookcrossing, the building shelf and lending between neighbours.
They sit on the same map, with a different marker, because they answer the same question — where do I find a book around here — but with a different rule: a library lends, so it wants the books back. It has opening hours, often a card, almost always free. We import only the ones open to the public; school, company or convent libraries, closed to passers-by, stay out. If you are curious how the different ways of keeping books moving fit together — boxes, public libraries, building shelves, lending between neighbours — there is a guide for that: what a distributed library is.
In two lines
The book box is circulation without friction: no agreement, no due date, no trust to extend to a stranger. It does not replace the book you ask a neighbour for — that remains the way to get the book you want — but it keeps a neighbourhood full of books even when nobody feels like messaging. If there is one below your home, use it; if there is not, perhaps you are the person who puts it there.
Points come from OpenStreetMap — © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL licence — and are refreshed once a month; the counts on this page once a day.