Librarian X With great power comes great bibliography.

Book swap shelves

One of the casualties of budget cuts at my library was the size of our browsing collection -- the rotating collection of books for pleasure reading that we display near the front entrance.

I love the countermeasure that the library came up with.  There's now a shelving unit near the circulation desk for the Book Swap collection.  They're books that anyone can pick up and take for free.  We seeded them with books donated by library staff, but the idea is that once you read a book, you can put it back, or keep it, or bring in books from home you no longer want.

I've had a lot of old novels at home that I've been giving away on Bookmooch one at a time for a while to make shelf space at home, but I'm going to start bringing them in to work a stack at a time now and adding them to the swap shelves.  (And this morning I found a novel that I didn't know about by a fantasy author I like.  I'll re-swap it when I've read it.)