I disagree with his conclusions, although some of his facts are probably correct: bookstores lose *some* money from libraries, and authors lose *some* money due to libraries. And I'm pretty sure that bestselling authors lose the most money: if my library hadn't bought 300 copies of the last Harry Potter book, I'm pretty sure everyone who checked the book out would have bought it instead.
And of course libraries aren't a natural phenomenon: they are created and paid for by tax money, which means that the government, more or less, is harming booksellers and authors by paying for libraries.
Having said that, though, I don't think it matters - taxes harm some people more than others; the decision to build roads in place A instead of place B harms some more than others...but we do those things anyway because we've decided that the tradeoff is worth it. And this is what we've done with libraries as well. I understand why he doesn't like the choices we've made, and of course it's helpful to sometimes be reminded that libraries aren't 100% beneficial. But since I believe that the upsides *far* outweigh the downsides, I think we should continue to fund them.
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Originally Posted by taustin
Nobody is entitled to make a living doing something nobody is willing to pay them to do.
Maybe he should take up buggy whip making instead.
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You have his argument backwards, I think. And you're being unfair to actual points he's making because you don't like his conclusions. *He* is making money hand over fist. His books are very popular and people want them. He's not objecting to the fact that people might not be buying his books; he's objecting to the fact that the government has set up a scheme to give away for free the books the books that he wrote and sells to support himself.
As I said above, I think he's wrong, but I don't have a problem with him pointing out the downsides: while I don't particularly disagree with the concept of taxation, I would still rather keep more money for myself, all things being equal.
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Originally Posted by Katsunami
It always seems that artists are the only people that want and even expect to profit for a lifetime from any work done. A writer writes one book, a singer writes one song, and so on. These can be sold millions of times, and the authors reap rewards their entire lives if the products stay popular.
I for one, who writes computer software (which is also creating / writing stuff), has to keep working and working, as in a matter of 1-3 years, nobody will want the current program, or current website system anymore. Maybe it won't even work on a new system. It will need to be updated or even replaced.
Work once, profit many times over. Only artists expect this, and they always whine when it doesn't work out that way. My father, who was a construction worker, never received any royalties for each time someone walks on a path he laid down or walks trhough a door he placed.
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This is just the difference between property and labor; it's hardly limited to artists. If you own stock, or rental property, or a business, or even just have money in an interest-bearing account, you can continue to reap profit from your property long after you did whatever work was necessary to acquire it: you can even pass the property down to your heirs, who may continue to reap profits from it. If your father built a rental house, he could continue to make money every month that someone occupied it.
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Originally Posted by meeera
Oh no, he writes Horrible Histories. My kid loves those books - which we discovered through our local public library. Ah well, we'll make sure to not buy any more of them, just borrow.
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It may well be the case for *him* that whatever money he would lose through not being discovered at a library (if any) would be offset through people buying his books rather than checking them out. He is so well-known that he's likely to be discovered through other means anyway. But this is not the case for less popular authors: for those individuals, libraries are probably much more beneficial.
Regardless, though, although I do think he points out some perhaps uncomfortable truths, the overall benefits of libraries are, I think, much greater than the downsides he points out: I have no problem acknowledging that he makes some good points, but continuing to support libraries.