Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
In some countries, authors do get paid for library loans. In the UK there's a central "pot" of money which gets paid to authors each year on the basis of their total number of library loans over the previous year. It's not a fortune, but a popular author can get a couple of thousand £ from it.
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It's called
Public Lending Right, and most authors get no more than £100 a year from it. Although it is of course true that libraries buy books and hence pay some royalties to authors, and although it is true that libraries act as showcases for lesser-known authors, the fact remains that authors are deprived of much income by libraries. In effect, authors subsidize the public library system, paying for the entertainment and enlightenment of people who earn far more than they do.
I campaigned against PLR in the 1980s, even going so far as to see my Member of Parliament at Westminster on the subject. Why should authors be so compensated, however inadequately, from the funds raised by general taxation? Far better to charge library-goers a small fee for each book borrowed -- with the usual dispensations for the young and the unemployed. Then people would not get the dangerous and ultimately corrosive idea in their heads that reading is somehow "free".
We are seeing some of the results of the past 100 years of this cultural conditioning in (a) the parlous state of the publishing industry and (b) the steep decline in the quality of modern writing.
To the pirates and apologists-for-the-indefensible posting here: if you persist in not paying the author, he will be unable to write. It is as simple as that. If you want nothing new, of any quality, to read in 20 years' time, by all means keep ripping off the authors and the publishers. Just don't complain when all you have left to read are books written 20, 50, or 100 years before -- by authors who, being conveniently dead, no longer need to feed themselves.