Reimbursing Authors

March 10

More podcast fun! This time from the Guardian Books podcast…

The title of this one is a little deceiving: author Tracy Chevalier [think The Girl with the Pearl Earring] talks about library loans. Isn’t that nice?! But is she just talking about how wonderful libraries are, how important literacy is? Nope. Way better and more unexpected. Get this, libraries in Britain actually PAY authors a little something when their books are borrowed from a library.

Seriously!

See, I told you you’d be surprised.

How civilized and forward thinking of the British .. I like it! Why don’t we have one, I thought? Turns out that Canada does participate in this program, it’s called The Public Lending Right Commission, or rather has a version of the program running here. The US however does not.

From their international website, “Public Lending Right is the right of authors to receive payment for free public use of their works in libraries.”

If you are an author in the US, get on the bandwagon man. Call your senator or representative. Wow, call someone. This just seems like an all around wonderful solution, one that acknowledges the rights and needs of everyone: the importance of literacy, the need to support writers who maintain and extend our literacy through their work while maintaining that iconic institution we know and love as the library.

p.s. a friend gave me a set of not-so-old-to-be-useless encyclopedias that i was very happy and thankful to receive. ya think I can find a shelf for them? Nope. Gah, I’m tired of seeing them lying around in grocery bags but don’t have the hutzpah yet to do the reorganization of bookshelves required to fit them. The list of things left undone because we hope to move this year is getting biggggger. Scary.

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