Is anyone borrowing my books?

Public Lending Right is a marvellous institution. It pays money to writers for the loan of their books from public libraries – funded by the government, without charging the borrowers themselves.

It was a struggle to get it. Brigid Brophy and her father John were the leading lights of the campaign, strongly supported by the TLS. Appropriately enough, it was all conducted rather decorously and mostly in print -- though there is supposed to have been one piece of direct action, in the form of a well-behaved demonstration on a traffic island in Belgrave Square. (Swedish writers, in a similar campaign, had a sharper eye for publicity: on one day they turned up at the public libraries in the big cities and simply borrowed all the books.)

Anyway, the first pay-outs here came in 1982. Now it provides cash to over 20,000 authors (who get between £1 and £6,600, at which point payments are capped.) Notice of this year’s amounts have just gone out.

I shall be getting – wait for it -- £18.54.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. In order to divide up the money, the PLR administrators take careful samples of the borrowing in selected libraries – and they publish reams of fascinating statistics. From these it’s pretty clear that people like me don’t have a chance of getting into the top category of those 363 authors earning between £5000 and £6600.

The greatest hits of this year have yet to be announced but, if recent years are anything to go by, the most lent author will be Jacqueline Wilson (who wrote The Illustrated Mum and a clutch of other favourite kids’ stories). And almost half the authors in the top 20 will also write for children (Dahl, the Ahlbergs, etc.). The truth is that public libraries have become a service for the very  young – the place where you go to inspire the nippers with a love for literature. For better or worse (and I’d say worse), they are no longer where many adults go in search of information (what’s Google for, after all?).

If adults go at all, it seems that it’s hardback fiction that they are mainly after. Josephine Cox and Danielle Steel came in second and third place in PLR’s top twenty last year (with sales in Steel’s case totalling over  500 million, I’m not quite sure this is the kind of struggling writers that the Brophy’s had in mind). And so far as I can see, there were no authors of non-fiction for adults in the top hundred; though Terry Deary, who wrote the Rotten Romans etc for kids, non-fictin of a kind, does get there.

So, I’m not too ashamed that a book I co-authored on classical art managed a grand total of  279 loans country-wide (I assume that means that one person in a sample library borrowed it, and the notional multiplier credits me with 279 loans); or that A Very Short Introduction to Classics made 273. And I suppose I can live with fact that my biography of the colossally important, eccentric female classicist (and sort-of feminist), Jane Harrison scored a complete duck.

But I am a bit sad about what all this seems to say about public libraries.

Comments

[Marty Busse]

Unless those borrowers are not paying tax, they certainly are paying for the scheme to compensate authors.

I am curious: if I have one of your books, and I loan it to a friend, do you think I should be forking over some cash to you?

[Oliver Nicholson]

Much thanks to Alex and to the Noble Lord for their helpful suggestions. I shall certainly look into the blog notion.
Oliver

[Alex Drace-Francis]

@Lord Truth: you really think we are increasing the attractiveness of Innocent Smoothies, BMW Mini Coopers, BT Total Broadband, ^&c.? I was firmly convinced that sales of these products plummeted by negative association whenever I logged on...

[Lord Truth]

Re Oliver Nicholsons unpleasant position:Surely you can set up your own blogsite-on blogspot.com it only takes a minute and post your academic material there where it can be instantly accessed and /or printed out.
Since you are providing your material free I cannot see how your publishers can legally object-any contract you have with them surely relates only to work that they publish or you charge for.

[Lord Truth]

Point taken -yet more to the point might be-"Is Anyone reading My Blogsite?" as the "Comments" seem to come from the same dozen or so academic crackpots,sesquipadalian loonies,showoffs(myself) with a few gushing"girls" to add a flavour of cocoa time at Roedean...hardly enough to fill the chairs round the dining table at Castle Truth...
I therefore would ask you to let us know approximately how many people actually read this site-50--50000?-and PLEASE do NOT give us the Pentagon style breezy brush off that -"We have no idea how many Iraq soldiers died in the war-we didnt bother to count"-when knowing exactly how many died and in what macabre ways is an essential part of establishing how effective ones weaponry is-just as Mr Murdoch didnt get where he is by not knowing to the last fraction of a farthing exactly who and what his customers were reading....and incidentally-your 18 pounds is not so bad for only 500 borrowings-we comment writers are wearing down our fingertips yet get no reward-not even a flash of that famous cocktail shaker...
It is perhaps typical of the essential skullduggery of this age, that all over the media world thousands of poor saps are innocently enlivening newspapers and radio programmes with their free contributions,bringing in yet more advertising revenue and profits at no expense...what suckers humans are....How Mr Murdoch must chuckle...What was it that Johnson said.....?

[Liz]

Of course, the weakness of the PLR scheme is that it doesn't reflect those readers who may choose to settle down in a public library for a good afternoon of solid research, but do not actually take any books out after consulting them in situ. I'm also curious as to whether academic libraries are at all consulted. Jane Harrison certainly still has a large, interested and curious audience!

[alex drace-francis]

Oliver, I'm sorry to hear the system is like that in the US. In the UK, higher education institutions are allowed to photocopy for free for study purposes as long as they register with the Copyright Licensing Agency. Not only that but authors eg of scholarly monographs & journal articles can get money back (using some estimated measure not unlike for PLR) by joining the Author's Licensing and Collecting Society. As I said, I'm not sure it's more just for the taxpayer to be rewarding the author (rather than the reader paying the publisher) whenever a work is consulted; but it seems fair to give authors a slice when their work is actually copied.

[Oliver Nicholson]

I teach large lecture classes (e.g. 70-100 for Age of Constantine) in a large public university. The only way to make sure that my very multifarious audience reads the articles from journals that I commend to their attention is to make them buy xerocopies of the pieces in question. About 15 years ago someone in the U.S. government decided that a copyright fee could be levied for such copies from our (genuinely impecunious) students. This has turned into a tiresome bureaucratic maze and some publishers (no names, no pack drill) frankly gouge money out of those in the academic world who can least afford it. This means that if I write a learned article about Julian the Apostate for which (naturally) I am not paid (nor would I wish to be), my students have to pay my publisher to be able to read it. Has anyone any suggestions for getting around this, or for persuading certain publishers that they are greedy ? Telling students to get the article from jstor is no solution, as it involves them having to take an initiative they are not all going to take.

[dr venables preller]

It could be time that this scheme, or something similar, were extended to recorded performances of serious music. Live performers at the other extreme are already well rewarded from gigs, record sales and broadcasts. But classical recordings, many of which become definitive legacy performances, are only viablee in many cases by subsidy from pop music. The scheme might also be used to legitimise limited copying for personal use by distributing a notional levy either from taxation or broadcast licence payments.

[Duncan__]

You wrote: "(I assume that means that one person in a sample library borrowed it, and the notional multiplier credits me with 279 loans)"

Not so. Apparently, a representative sample of libraries across 30-odd local authorities supplies the data. My own books were borrowed 25 times in these libraries, so I "earned" £1.44. I shan't be giving up the day job.

[Alex Drace-Francis]

Devil's advocate time again:
1)The situation you describe is neither new nor sad. QD Leavis was banging on in the 20s about what dreadful fiction these places have and the scandalous unavailability of the TLS in Dorking. But be honest - have you read the books you slag off? Life being, as it is, terrible, people need their fantasy, and in many cases it is less corrupting than the often manipulative exegesis of so-called 'serious' history.
2) Mistaking the medium for the message. I like books, but there's nothing intrinsically 'better' about their contents in comparison to other media. Words can be inferior to other modes of signification. If something's wrong on Wikipedia, it wouldn't be right if it were in book form.
3) PLR belongs to a particular epoch of the etatisation of culture. Why pay authors when their product is reused, and not do the same for manufacturers of screwdrivers and plastic carrier bags? It's not even a good measure of usage, as I'm sure you have 10,000 readers who peruse your monograph in situ rather than take it home (particularly the case for the more voracious reader & the heavier book).

[Johanna.]

My grandma gives me your books, but I did borrow your 'A Very Short Introduction to Classics' from the school library, hence why you weren't paid for it, and I then encouraged a friend to borrow it, too. I must bemoan that the Classics' sections of public libraries are very sparse, but other than that, they're amazing.

[Victoria]

(Another classicist here by the way.) I go the public library once a week, and have done all my life (as small children we were always taken on Saturday mornings). I am always so surprised how few other people I know who do so; the vast majority of my friends as a graduate student didn't even know where the Cambridge public library was. As a graduate student lots of people say that they can't really bear to read, even fiction, when they're reading all day for work, but I have never found this; and if you read a good deal, and fast, it's horribly expensive to buy things to read them once (although buying from Oxfam and giving them back to Oxfam also works quite well). I am lucky enough to live in Oxford (and before that as a graduate at Cambridge) both of which have good public libraries with extensive and reasonably sophisticated stock that ranges beyond popular fiction (not that I am averse to that necessarily). They are often particularly good in my experience for poetry, an excellent way of reading new poets before committing to buying one; also for borrowing CDs, a good way to compare at leisure different recordings of a given piece. But even a small library can order pretty obscure things for you, given a bit of time; as a small child I was seized with a desire to read an obscure play of J. M. Barrie (I think I had seen it on television and became obsessed) and my mother was able to order it through our very minor local library.

It is true of course that I - like most people now I imagine - don't use it for 'information' (that's the internet). But I too am sad that more people don't enjoy it for the sheer pleasure of browsing and borrowing such various things for free.

[betty]

Be reassured Mary - I don't borrow your books, because I buy them. And I require my students to buy and read A Very Short Introduction to the Classics before they start the course. So I hope royalties are worth more than PLR.

I don't use public libraries much - I buy books which lie around the house in great mouldering heaps, until I have a purge and send a few boxes to the secondhand bookshop, where I am paid a laughably tiny sum for them. Our local public library is very strong on Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Harry Potter, but short on anything I want to use for any purpose but entertainment. And being in an area of immigrants, it caters extremely well for readers of Hebrew, Russian and Polish. Not me, alas.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Anyone who has wrestled with T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land," with its roots in ancient pracices and rituals, will have encountered James Frazer and Jane Harrison, and through them have understood how influential Cambridge was in the shaping of modern thought. You have performed a service in bringing her back to life, evan if that is not reflected in borrowings from the public library.
On a different question, there is the perennial problem of how struggling writers are to support themselves. PLR can be the answer only in a very few cases. For Eliot it was lowly employment with Lloyds.

[Max]

Um. If one book got loaned 279 times and another 273, then any "notional multiplier" can hardly be 279, can it? The highest common factor of the two is 3.

[H Roach]

Let me make sure I understand this. The government "pays you" when people check your books out of the library.

By chance does the government spend more money managing the program than it pays out to the writers?

I wonder if Ptolemy had a similar program at the Library of Alexandria.

[Jackie]

Does the Public Lending Right extend to University libraries? I would guess that your biggest 'borrowing' audience is there. I tend to use that, or, if that fails and its not too expensive, buy the book myself. The public library is not a place I visit very often at all, probably to my shame!

[Tim Lacy]

Mary: Very interesting. I'm not sure if they have anything like Britain's Public Lending Right here in the U.S. My wife was in an library science program here, so I'll check with her. - TL