Libraries and books — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is somewhere a book is lent, sold or left out for strangers. There are more than 210,000 worldwide. Colour represents which of the three it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who runs it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every feature here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a shopfront they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves. Several countries publish complete lists of their public libraries, and we use none of them, so these are OpenStreetMap's own counts.

What we include

Three exact tags:

`amenity=library` is an institution that lends books, and it is about half the map. Public, national, university and specialist libraries all count.
`shop=books` is a retailer that sells them, and it is a bit over a quarter. New and second-hand alike, since too few record which they are to colour by.
`amenity=public_bookcase` is the street cabinet anyone may take from or add to, and it is about a fifth. The German Bücherschrank, the French boîte à livres and the Little Free Library are all this.

Newsagents and stationers that happen to sell books are not here, because they carry their own tags. Because we match each tag exactly, a library also tagged as an archive falls out.

Colour

Colour represents which of the three a place is. They share a map because the balance between them is worth seeing, and you can't see it on any of them alone. Fewer than fifty features in the whole layer carry two of the three tags, so in practice the classes don't overlap.

Public bookcases are mostly a European and North American habit

You should know this before reading anything into the orange. A street cabinet of free books is a specific social form that took hold in Germany, France, the Netherlands and North America over the last twenty years. The blankness across much of Asia and Africa is real rather than a gap in the mapping, and nobody claims these are widespread elsewhere and merely unmapped. What the orange does not measure is how much a place reads.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the feature in square metres. About three features in four have no outline at all, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for most of this map the size is not telling you how large the place is. The share differs sharply by class. A library is usually a building of its own, a bookshop is usually a unit inside somebody else's, and a bookcase is furniture.

Among the features that do have a shape, a typical one covers about 500 m², against about 11 m² for a bookcase, which is a wardrobe or a converted telephone box.

Two things distort the top of the range. The largest feature is a book warehouse rather than a reading library, so we cap the size scale well below it. And a small number of buildings tagged as public bookcases are really libraries, including a national library with its own Wikipedia article, which means the size of an orange dot is not reliable. We remove neither, because any rule that caught them would also catch genuine large features.

Where the map is empty

An absent library or shop means nobody has mapped it, not that it isn't there. Coverage is strongest in western and central Europe and other well mapped regions.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. Bookshops close more often than most things on this site, so a shop shown here may have gone.

Source and licence

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