Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Please see earlier in the thread. UK libraries, under a system called the "Public Lending Right" pay authors 5.98p (roughly 10c) every time one of their books is checked out of the library, up to a maximum paymant of £6,600 per year (about $10,000) per author. ie the author does get compensated when a book is checked out of the library.
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I must say i'm very much annoyed by your disingenuousness here. When you brought this up earlier, Moejoe said this in response to your suggestion that authors got a "substantial" part of their income from these library lending payments:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Of the 32,000 plus who were eligible for payments from the PLR, the vast majority made between £1-99, with only 352 reaching the £5-6,000 limit. Of course those 352 are already multi-million dollar sellers for the most part and the money would be a drop in the ocean for them. It might buy JK Rowling a clue about the digital age, but not much more. If you're seriously arguing that £1-99 makes a difference in a writer's income per year, then I really don't know what to say. Even at the threshold of >£500 which is the next biggest tally, the actual benefit of the payment is negligible, and probably wouldn't bring most authors up to the national minimum-living wage.
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Now, whether this is factually correct is something I do not know, but since you chose to ignore this entirely, preferring to respond to the most uncontroversial part of his reply, it would seem that whether this is factual or not matters little to you.
Why is that, exactly? If it were incorrect I'm sure someone could've bothered to correct him, but since nobody did, I'm guessing there's some truth to it, meaning that those PLR payments are mostly meaningless (looking at patricia's anecdotal support as well). Except for that one payment to that American guy, which you present as a paradigm case, but who really is an outlier, and who also (conveniently) is paid a nice and round (and big) dollar (rather than the smaller GBP) amount for the sake of (your) argument.
As such, I'd like to request you stop using this argument, as it doesn't seem to hold water. Considering only those
known by the PLR get money, and that for the overwhelming majority of that subset of authors the actual amount paid out is negligible, it does not seem to be a valid argument for your suggestion that using a library is "wholly different" from downloading a book and subsequently deleting it (or whatever).
Disclaimer: I'm assuming library payment schemes in other countries are at best on a par with the british system, and usually worse (for the authors).