Think the little red book was a bad strategy for its time because it's essentially a collection of quotations, so it wasn't good for systematic understanding of Mao's thought. In the modern day the internet at least makes it somewhat better because the LRB has citations, so you can just look them up and see the context for the statement.

I'm kind of curious how the LRB came about, since it feels pretty condescending, but Mao was perhaps the most optimistic political leader I've ever heard of in terms of just giving the people a small bit of advice or a revised law and letting them handle the rest (this sometimes went extremely poorly, of course).