No fines, no rules, no shushing
Imagine a library where there are no due dates and no librarians telling you to be quiet. Israeli artists have developed a new model for the urban library: a free bus-stop library for commuters and travelers of all ages.
Daniel Shoshan, an installation artist and lecturer at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, along with Technion graduate Amit Matalon, started this new public library concept figuring that people sometimes have long wait times for buses.
Their motto: You may take, you may return, you may add.
The duo built a series of bookshelves at bus stops throughout Israeli cities. The idea is that anyone may take a book from the shelf, read it at the station or take it on the bus and return it when done.
No due dates, no late fees, no rules.
Wait in line at the bus stop, shuffle through a few books, and take one with you on the commute? The idea could not only increase literacy rates in communities, but also serve as a new way of connecting people.
“Citizens in the city are now creating new ways of sharing,” says Shoshan. “In Kfar Saba, Hadar Yossef and Haifa, people started to exchange books among themselves without any rules in place. You can put your books on the shelf, and others will add or take from it. It’s just the citizens and neighborhood monitoring it by themselves.”
This could also be a creative marketing platform for unknown authors to spread their works. Israel already has professors giving scholarly lectures on trains. Maybe thanks to this new project, new authors will give public reading at bus stops.
Shoshan thinks such a project could work as a community-builder in disadvantaged areas as well. With little outlay in costs, what’s to lose?
Israeli Innovation & Beyond 