The Book Corners map over Europe. Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Book Corners maps 37,233 places where you can leave a book or take one, from Seattle’s charter-signed boxes to a shelf on a Canadian ferry dock and nearly 16,000 French boîtes à livres. Anyone with an account can add one, and the whole catalogue is free to download.
The obvious comparison is the Little Free Library map, and the difference is who gets listed. Little Free Library, a nonprofit in St. Paul, Minnesota, counts more than 200,000 libraries in its network, but its map shows only registered ones — registering means buying a charter sign — and only when the steward switches the listing on. Book Corners takes any public bookcase from anyone. That tips the map toward Europe: France leads with 15,926 entries, then the US at 6,036, Germany at 5,235 and the UK at 2,104. In North America, the charity’s map is still the bigger one.
Search by city, postcode or address, or zoom in until the clusters break into single pins. Entries are short and specific: Little Free Library #9161 in Seattle holds “science fiction, mystery, decorating, gardening, political, and children’s books. Occasionally some manga or Japanese novels”; on Bowen Island, British Columbia, a shelf sits under the shelter on the Snug Cove ferry dock.
The find promised photos on every pin, but only 616 of the 37,233 entries have one. Much of the catalogue came in bulk from OpenStreetMap, and it already stood at 37,166 by the end of March, so community additions are still few. Browsing needs no account. Submitting or reporting one does, and every submission is reviewed before it goes live. Photos with GPS data fill in the address themselves.
Andrea Grandi, a developer of 30 years, built Book Corners as a side project and publishes the code on GitHub under the MIT licence. Signed-in users can download the whole catalogue as GeoJSON under the Open Database License, crediting Book Corners and OpenStreetMap. A public REST API needs no key for searches. There’s a free iPhone app (iOS 26 or later), the site is in English and Italian, and new entries are posted daily to Mastodon and Bluesky.