ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Little Free Libraries are for more than printed reading materials.

Users of the streetside stations give and receive all manner of non-reading merchandise, such as homemade trinkets, canned goods and garden seeds.

This all occurs with the blessing of the nonprofit, St. Paul-based Little Free Library.

So Abe Eyman of St. Paul had an idea: Why not outfit old Kindle-style e-book readers with dozens of books and give away the e-readers in Little Free Libraries?

The timing for such a maneuver is excellent.

Amazon is ending support for older Kindles and Kindle Fire readers, meaning that these ancient devices no longer are suitable for buying Amazon e-books.

However: “That’s not the only way to get books onto an e-reader,” Eyman said.

“My idea was that if people were going to be just recycling their perfectly good technology, I would take it from them and load a bunch of classics or other books” that aren’t copyright-protected, the data scientist said.

Books that are free to distribute in this manner are in the public domain (where a copyright has expired) or released under open licenses such as Creative Commons.

Books old and new

Eyman didn’t have any obsolete e-readers, so he put out a call via a community post. In short order, he collected nearly half a dozen devices — including a couple of Nook e-readers made by Barnes & Noble.

Books that Eyman handpicked for distribution via his Kindle maneuver include “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Don Quixote,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Dracula,” W.E.B Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk” and all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” novels.

He included “Destiny’s Edge,” a modern novel by New York Times bestselling author M.L. Wang, because she authorized it to be distributed at no cost.

He has his own Little Free Library, so he stashed the first of his modified Kindles in it on Aug. 9. Within a few days, the e-reader was gone.

Not his first rodeo

This isn’t Eyman’s first stunt with aging technology. On a couple of occasions, he has rejuvenated old laptops by installing versions of the geeky Linux operating system on them.

One time, he installed Linux Mint on six laptops and donated them to North High School in Minneapolis for distribution to graduating seniors.

Another time, he put the kid-friendly DouDou Linux on four laptops for use by toddlers.

He says he feels “passionately about tech waste reduction.” He is also an obsessive reader who has coded his own app for keeping track of his latest reads.

Little Free Library

Eyman’s Kindle project comes with the informal Little Free Library seal of approval.

“In general, people use Little Free Libraries to share all sorts of things with their community,” said Executive Director Daniel Gumnit. “And I think that’s one of the beauties of Little Free Libraries and the stewards who run them — they’re responsive to their communities’ needs.”

Gumnit said he came by an odd, treasured curio via a Little Free Library.

The little music box “made me laugh because clearly it’s a joke. The music is completely nonsensical. It’s really weird and it’s hilarious.”

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