The library already on your street.

Your reading list is live. When a book you want turns up in your city, you hear first. Abridgedly puts the books your neighbors already own on one map: borrow one, hand off the one you're done with.

Free. No ads, no trackers.

No account needed to look around · Your address stays private

abridgedly.com/map

All books Free Borrow

513 books on the map

The Overstory Richard Powers Free to a neighbor 5 min

On the map right now

Free
Borrow
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Browse the map

513 books 45,927 little libraries $0 to borrow

513

books on neighborhood maps

45,927

little libraries on the map

to list, browse, borrow, or lend

See it work.

The whole app in thirty seconds. No sound.

It tells you when it matters: a box you pass, a shelf you follow, a neighbour asking for a book.

A book leaves your shelf in under a minute.

Point your camera at the cover

Title, author, and cover art fill themselves in. Barcode or ISBN works too.

Cover matched

Say how it can travel

Free, borrow, rent, or sell, and where you'd like to hand it over.

Free Borrow Rent Buy Free to a neighbor Lent for a while, then back to you Rented by the week, paid to you Sold at your price, no cut taken Pickup: Ash Street Coffee

Meet a neighbor

They message you in Abridgedly. You agree on a time. That's the whole handoff.

Is The Overstory still around? I'm on Weldon. It's yours, porch box till Sunday.

Everything a block needs to trade books.

One map, one inbox, one shelf you actually keep up to date. Nothing to ship, no algorithms deciding who gets to read what.

Your shelves, organized like real ones

Group books by porch box, genre, or what you're willing to lend. Public shelves show on the map; private ones are just for you.

Set up a shelf

Trolley Park Little Library On the map

+18

24 books · 2 out on loan Updated 2 days ago

Lists for the books you don't have yet

A reading list is a shelf turned around: what you're after rather than what you're lending. Make it public and it gets a page you can hand anyone, and whoever follows it hears when you add a book.

Scan a stack in one sitting

Keep the camera open and work through a pile. Abridgedly recognizes covers and queues them up for a single review.

Messages that stay in Abridgedly

Arrange a handoff without handing over your phone number. Requests, holds, and returns all live in one thread.

A book club that stays put

Your club gets a page of its own: the book you're on now, the reading list under it, and a discussion that doesn't scroll away. One join link brings everyone across.

How clubs work

Your address is never on the map

Books show up in a neighborhood-sized area rather than at a point, and you choose the public spot where you actually meet. No profiles for sale, no location history, no ads.

Approximate pin, always You pick the meeting place Delete your shelf any time

The little library on your corner, finally findable.

Every little library we know about is already a pin on the map with a page of its own, and anyone can scan books into it, so the next person can see what's inside before they walk over.

A public page for every box, showing what neighbors have put in it

Follow a box and hear when someone stocks it, photographs it, or leaves a note

Ask to claim the box you host, and it's yours to take off the map whenever you like

Free for stewards, forever, with no listing or transaction fees

Coming: a wishlist for the box, so it can say what it's short of

Find the boxes near you

The things people ask first.

Still wondering something? Write to us and a person answers.

Does it cost anything?

Listing, browsing, borrowing and lending are free, and when you rent or sell a book the money goes directly between the two of you: we take no cut of it. What is not free is doing it at scale. Past 100 books listed for sale or rent, or 100 shelf photos in 30 days, carrying on needs Abridgedly Plus, $10.00/month, which also lets you keep your own Bookshop.org affiliate revenue on the copies you list rather than ours. A claimed bookshop or library keeps theirs for free, subscription or not. It is the only paid thing there is.

Do I have to give out my address?

Never. Books appear on the map in a neighborhood-sized area rather than at your door, and you choose a public pickup spot, a café, a library step, the corner box, when you agree on a handoff.

Can I look around before signing up?

Yes. The map is open to anyone. You only need an account when you want to message someone or list a book of your own.

What if a borrowed book never comes back?

You agree the terms when you hand it over, and the loan stays in your exchange thread as the record of what you both said. Once a book comes back you close the exchange out and can rate each other, so how someone handles a loan follows them.

I run a little library. Is this for me?

Yes. The box is on the map already and has its own public page, anyone can scan books into it so people can see what's inside, and you can ask to claim the one you host, which lets you take the listing down whenever you like. Neighbors can follow the box and hear when somebody stocks it, photographs it or leaves a note. A wishlist, so the box can say what it's short of, is still to come.

What does AI do here?

Nothing you read on Abridgedly was written by a machine pretending to be a person. Notes, reviews and club posts come from neighbors, or from us and signed; a book's description comes from a library catalogue, not from either.
The camera reads, it does not write. A vision model turns a spine photo into text, a catalogue matches that text to a book where it can, and you confirm it before it reaches your shelf.
Your shelves, lists and messages are not training data. We do not sell them, license them, or hand them to anyone training a model.
No machine hides your books or judges a report. A person settles every hide and every claim, and we say so where it happens.
We build with AI tools and say so. The line we hold is about what you read, not about how we type.

Start with one book and see who's out there.

Free to list, free to browse, free to borrow. It takes about a minute to put your first book on the map.

Join Abridgedly Browse the map first

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