If the library wanted to get rid of them, they would've quietly removed the books; I suspect they want people to read them before they're removed, hence the "please give this book a chance" marker.

A deprecation marker is a "this will be removed"; these markers are "this will be removed if nobody reads them even with this marker in them".

I had the exact same concern with the featured article: I hope they are keeping separate statistics for spontaneously browsed views vs views specifically through this page. If not, the less visited bins will rise and potentialy make all views uniform in the extreme... I also hope they keep dates for the views, with PCA you can still distinguish distinct distributions being weighted with coefficients changing over time (say because of this internal page, or any external page effectively providing the same service!)

> imagine you develop a product with a number of features with a public API, and telemetry points that a feature goes unused

The cost of maintaining a book is much, much less than a product feature!

I think I mostly agree with you, but at least OP is reading the books. If someone don't bother to read it after them it'll be marked as abandoned again.

I think the mission of libraries go beyond providing the most popular books. There is that, of course, a library that doesn't have the books people want is a bit pointless. But having a few titles that are not as popular help preserve something that may otherwise be lost.

They clearly did have a desire to borrow that book, as evidenced by the fact that they borrowed it of their own free will. You’ve just arbitrarily decided that their reason is unworthy.

> Along you come and interrupt that signal, in a way that doesn't have underlying desire to borrow that book. So the clock gets reset, and so it goes.

Frankly, parent borrows the books and reads them. Far from malicious, maybe a bit quirky, this kind of behavior needs not be corrected, especially from an anonymous jay like yourself.