LIBRARIES ARE THE NEW PIRACY

ITEM: Children’s author Terry Deary causes a stir by saying libraries are irrelevant in the 21st century and – even worse – are killing the book industry and depriving authors like him of money by giving away their work repeatedly for free. 

Indeed, he says, libraries are responsible for putting the silly idea into people’s heads that no one should have to pay to read a book:

"Because it's been 150 years, we've got this idea that we've got an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers. This is not the Victorian age, when we wanted to allow the impoverished access to literature. We pay for compulsory schooling to do that …"

Also, libraries are killing the book industry:

"Books aren't public property, and writers aren't Enid Blyton, middle-class women indulging in a pleasant little hobby. They've got to make a living. Authors, booksellers and publishers need to eat. We don't expect to go to a food library to be fed." […]

What other industry creates a product and allows someone else to give it away, endlessly? The car industry would collapse if we went to car libraries for free use of Porsches … Librarians are lovely people and libraries are lovely places, but they are damaging the book industry. They are putting bookshops out of business, and I'm afraid we have to look at what place they have in the 21st century."

As you might expect, many other authors don’t agree with him, starting with Neil Gaiman.

As you also might expect, Deary has since responded to all the criticism, claiming that everyone completely missed the point he was trying to make.

“No-one is even reading what I’m saying. I never attacked libraries, I said we need to think about people’s access to literature.”

Anyway, anti-library sentiment is nothing new. In the US, libraries have become the bane of conservatives who think libraries are a waste of tax money because they can’t stand the idea that liberals are taxing them to pay for an elitist liberally biased cultural center we don’t need them thanks to bookstores, the internet and Amazon.com and Kindles and whatnot.

I’ve written about that before, and what I said then applies here.

As for Deary’s specific complaint that libraries are killing the book industry, it’s a ludicrous premise. For a start, libraries have been around longer than the modern book industry. If the “free books” model was an industry killer, there would be no book industry to begin with. Bookshops may be closing down, but that’s more the product of the entire business model changing as people buy books online, whether in dead-tree or e-book formats.

As for Deary’s claim that libraries deprive authors of income, see the above point about the book industry in general surviving the “free book” model. Now, as an aspiring writer myself, I get that authors ideally want to be able to make a living from writing. And I fully admit this is an issue for authors who scrape by with small audiences, as opposed to authors like, say, Gaiman and Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer who sell tons of books and have movie-rights deals for good measure.

The problem is Deary’s faulty logic that every freeloader who checks books out of a library is someone who would otherwise pay for them in a bookshop. The same logic has been used by record companies to argue that file sharing should be illegal. In both cases, it demonstrates a really poor understanding of why people opt for free media. Maybe they lost that book or album and don’t want to buy a replacement copy to read it again. Maybe they don’t want to blow $10 to try a new author/artist to see if they’re worth reading. Maybe they actually can’t afford to spend very much on entertainment.

In any case, preventing someone from reading yr books for free will not necessarily change them into a paying customer. Meanwhile, letting someone read one of yr books for free could lead to sales of future books if they really like yr work.

So all up, Deary’s argument doesn’t wash. Even if his point really was to get a debate going about the role and relevance of libraries in the 21st century – which is a valid topic and one that should be addressed – he didn’t quite succeed, seeing as how people aren’t debating library reform so much as they’re debating whether Terry Deary is greedy, dumb or both.

Checking out,

This is dF

MY VERY FIRST (HONG KONG) LIBRARY CARD

Speaking of libraries …

ITEM: After 17 years in Hong Kong, I finally got me a library card last week.

Why did I wait so long?

Not because of the lack of English-language books. Many HK libraries do carry them (albeit to varying degrees).

Mainly it’s because my taste in books is generally better served by bookstores (new and used) and Amazon, and I can afford to indulge that taste. Also, I love having shelves full of books in my home.

The other problem is that, because I have a “to read” backlog of something like 25 books at any given time, it’s hard to work in library books that have to be read within a certain time period. Yes, I know, I can renew it, but I’ve always found that to be a pain.

Then again, I haven’t checked a book out of a library for a long time. Nowadays (at least here in HK) you can do the whole renewal thing by phone or online. So I’m out of excuses.

Anyway, I’m strangely pleased to have a library card again, even though I mainly got it so I can help the bride check out books she needs to teach her Sunday school classes. But I do intend to use it for my own purposes.

Libraries kick ass,

This is dF

dEFROG ON 45 #50: WAIT FOR THE WEEKEND TO GO OFF THE DEEP END

Coming up on Episode 50 of this series, and people ask: “How come you haven’t mentioned The Eagles yet?”

So let’s take care of that right now.

Obviously The Eagles dominated the airwaves and the charts in the mid-late 70s. And I confess I liked a lot of their songs, starting from “Witchy Woman” and “One Of These Nights” up to all the hits from their album The Long Run.

Interestingly, though, I only ever bought one 45 of theirs – “Heartache Tonight”. And it paled in comparison to the B-side, “Teenage Jail”, which I ended up liking more because it didn’t really sound like a typical Eagles song.

These days, I’m ambivalent towards The Eagles. But I still do like listening to their earlier stuff sometimes, especially the spooky ones.

And of course, “Journey Of The Sorcerer,” which ended up being the theme to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series. That never gets old.

FUN FACT: I almost bought a 45 of “Life In The Fast Lane” once. I was music director at a college radio station where the general manager had very strict rules on swearing in songs, due to the fact that we were part of a conservative college in a conservative town (Clarksville, TN, represent!). He freely admitted the down-side was not being able to play “Life In The Fast Lane”, his favorite Eagles song, because of the lyric “We’ve been up and down this highway / haven’t seen a goddamn thing”.

I distinctly remembered hearing an edited version on the radio when the single came out, with the lyric changed to “damn thing”, which was acceptable to the GM. So I started trawling used record stores to find the 45 version. I eventually found a few, but every one of them had the original album version. So either the radio station in question had a special FCC-friendly copy of the 45, or they did their own edit on tape.

Young, vicious and frail,

This is dF