Not perfect, but not half bad
I purchased one of these about a year ago and have generally been pretty satisfied with it. It’s made out of nice wood, and has pretty good craftmanship, although the door is pretty disappointing. It leaves a substantial air gap all around. I don’t know if maybe that was an intentional effort to let it breathe, but I don’t care for the idea of bugs making a home inside it. I managed to find some thin (6mm wide, 3mm thick) weather stripping, and still I had to use two magnetic catches to get the door to sit right against the face. And that mostly did the job done although ants have still managed to crawl inside. There was no food in the box, but we had been taking a liberal definition of book sharing and they evidently thought a DVD case would be a nice place to build a nest. Also the hinges and door knob don’t seem like they were meant for outdoors. They started rusting. I painted them with clear nail polish to hopefully keep them from degrading any further. So in all it took a fair amount of work to get it up to snuff, but I’m no carpenter so I’m sure it still turned out better than if I’d tried to build the whole thing from scratch. And it saved me a lot of manual labor that I really don’t have the capacity to do right now. As it was, I had to have some people over to help me install it. You’ll need to provide a post and some wood glue, but all the hardware is included. We used one of those no-dig, screw-in ground anchors and it seems to be holding well a year later. I don’t think I’ll be putting a dog leash anchor point on my post, but for just holding the library up I’m satisfied. Remember to call your local utility locating service before you dig — it’s usually free and I found the process, at least in my area, to be quite painless.<br /><br />Once it’s all set up, probably the most disappointing thing about it is the size. It’s just barely adequate. Big books have to lay flat, which might not be so bad except it doesn’t really have the vertical clearance to spare if you’re trying to arrange books in the traditional/convenient vertical position. If I could change anything about it, I’d really like for it to be even just an inch and a half taller.<br /><br />I also decided to put in a little “rechargeable” dehumidifier (which consists of a desiccant product and has a color changing indicator to let you know when it’s full, at which point you remove it from the library and plug it in to heat up and expel the moisture). I don’t know if it’s really necessary but we can get fairly humid in the summer and I wanted to try to protect the books.<br /><br />I enjoy maintaining the library — tidying up and swapping out books to keep things interesting. I’m in a relatively small neighborhood, so I don’t get a lot of traffic but a couple neighbors have remarked positively about it. And our small community and slow turnover probably mean that this small-ish library size is actually about right for us. It’s not even entirely fair to call it small. Most book sharing boxes are about this size. But I’d avoid going any smaller than this.<br /><br />The Simplay Sharing Library is the economy approach. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it looks a bit like a Little Tikes Playhouse, so consider whether that goes with the aesthetic of your house and neighborhood. On the other end of the spectrum, Little Free Library offers a similar box made of composite rather than wood that might last longer with less maintenance. They also offer a rather spacious “Double Shed” design. Both of those latter two require you to do all the assembly,  though.
Rating: 4 stars