Libraries and books — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is somewhere a book is lent, sold, or left out for strangers — a feature tagged `amenity=library`, `shop=books` or `amenity=public_bookcase` in OpenStreetMap. 213,766 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by the footprint of the building.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — who runs it, its access condition where one is stated, and its website. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every feature links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

Three colours: lent, sold, given away

Libraries — 110,701 features, 51.8%. An institution that lends books.
Bookshops — 57,708, 27.0%. A retailer that sells them.
Public bookcases — 45,401, 21.2%. The street cabinet anyone may take from or add to: the German Bücherschrank, the French boîte à livres, the Little Free Library.

These three are one map because the balance between them is the thing worth seeing, and it is not visible on any of them alone. A country's reading provision can lean public or commercial, and it does:

| | libraries /M | bookshops /M | bookcases /M | leans | |---|---|---|---|---| | France | 132.6 | 62.3 | 256.3 | libraries | | Germany | 73.0 | 51.0 | 69.0 | libraries | | Australia | 59.8 | 20.2 | 25.5 | libraries | | United Kingdom | 58.3 | 34.9 | 33.9 | libraries | | United States | 57.5 | 15.7 | 24.5 | libraries | | Japan | 31.1 | 34.9 | 0.3 | bookshops | | Brazil | 9.7 | 3.4 | 0.2 | libraries | | India | 4.2 | 1.0 | 0.0 | libraries | | Indonesia | 2.9 | 1.5 | 0.0 | libraries | | China | 1.8 | 0.9 | 0.0 | libraries | | Nigeria | 0.3 | 0.1 | 0.0 | libraries |

Per million people. Japan is the only country measured where bookshops outnumber libraries per head — 4,346 against 3,878. The United States runs nearly four libraries for every bookshop; France runs more than two, and has more libraries per person than anywhere else measured.

Only 44 features in the whole layer carry two of the three tags at once — 41 both library and shop, 3 both bookcase and shop. In practice the classes do not overlap.

Public bookcases are almost entirely a European habit, and you should know that before reading the map

This is the most geographically concentrated thing on HueMaps. Per million people, Germany has 3,793 times India's rate. France alone holds 17,478 — more than the other ten countries in that table put together. Japan has 38, China 20, India 26, Nigeria none at all.

That blankness across Asia and Africa is real, not a gap in the mapping. 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. Nobody claims they are widespread elsewhere and merely unmapped. This is the same judgement the windmills layer makes about a comparably lopsided map: where the concentration is genuine geography, the layer stays and the page says so.

What you should not do is read the orange as a measure of how much a country reads. It measures one particular European and North American institution.

Where a cabinet is one, it is tiny. Only 1.2% of this class is traced as an outline at all, and among those the median footprint is 11 m² — a wardrobe, a converted telephone box, a shelf under a roof. Compare 583 m² for a library.

Some "public bookcases" are actually libraries

A caveat found by building the layer rather than by reading the tag documentation. Of the 536 public bookcases that do have a traced footprint, 102 — 19% — are named as libraries, mostly across Latin America and Spain: Biblioteca Julian Padron, Biblioteca Narciso Bassols, Biblioteca Pere Anguera. The clearest case is the National Library of Peru, 13,095 m², with its own Wikipedia article, tagged `amenity=public_bookcase`. The largest object in the whole class is a 5.4-hectare public park in Bogotá; the second is the Guangzhou Archives Bureau.

157 features in this class carry a Wikipedia or Wikidata link, which a street cabinet essentially never does.

The practical effect is narrow. It is 0.2% of the class, so the counts above are unaffected — but it means the size of an orange dot is not reliable, because the largest ones are mostly mis-tagged buildings. Nothing is filtered out: a rule that removed them would also remove genuine large bookcases, and stating the problem is more honest than hiding it imperfectly.

Three features in four are a point, not a shape

76.3% of this layer has no footprint at all. The share differs sharply by class:

Libraries — 39.4% traced. A library is usually a building of its own.
Bookshops — 11.5%. A shop is a unit inside somebody else's building, so a mapper marks a point.
Public bookcases — 1.2%. It is furniture.

So the size of most dots is not telling you how large the place is. Untraced features are drawn at one nominal size, set at the median of those that do have a shape. Where a feature genuinely is traced, its size is real.

Why this map zooms deeper than most

Most layers here stop at zoom 16. This one goes to 18, and the reason is a single street.

The densest zoom-16 tile on earth holds 73 of these features, and it is Jinbōchō in Tokyo — the largest concentration of second-hand bookshops in the world, where more than a hundred shops stand a few metres apart along one street. Behind it come Dhaka with 65, Athens with 56 and Karachi with 52. Notice that none of those is in western Europe: the densest book places on the planet are not where the bookcases are.

At zoom 16, features too close together to separate all get drawn at the deepest zoom available, which is also the deepest you can go — so Jinbōchō arrived as a single unreadable clump. Two more zoom levels let them come apart. It costs a larger map file, which is why it is not done everywhere.

What counts here

Libraries — everything tagged `amenity=library`: public libraries, university and school libraries mapped separately from their campus, national libraries, and specialist collections in law, medicine, monasteries and company archives.

Bookshops — everything tagged `shop=books`. New and second-hand alike; only 4.2% record which they are, too few to colour by. Newsagents and stationers that happen to sell books are not here, since they carry their own tags.

Public bookcases — everything tagged `amenity=public_bookcase`. Where the kind of cabinet is recorded (39.7% of them), the commonest are a wooden cabinet (5,600), a converted telephone box (4,290) and a purpose-built reading box (4,119). That describes the furniture rather than the books, so the map does not colour by it.

Libraries that are also archives, and similar combinations, are missed. The selection matches each tag exactly, so a feature tagged `amenity=library;archive` falls out. This is uncommon.

Naming

88.4% of libraries and 91.5% of bookshops carry a name — but only 24.1% of public bookcases. A bookcase is furniture rather than a business, so most are an unnamed point and the panel is thin when you click one. That is honest rather than a fault; inventing a label would be worse than an empty panel.

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or a shopfront they walked past. Nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no national register of libraries or booksellers has been merged in. Several countries publish complete lists of their public libraries; none is used here, so these counts are OpenStreetMap's own.

Size

Each symbol is sized by the footprint of the feature, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root).

Among the quarter of features that are traced, the median footprint is 517 m², the 90th percentile 2,507 m² and the 99th 8,400 m².

The largest feature on the layer is not a reading library. The Library of Congress's High Density Storage Facility in Virginia is 404,696 m²: a book warehouse, forty-eight times the 99th percentile. The size scale is capped well below it so that ordinary libraries and shops remain distinguishable from one another.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. 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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