Toronto libraries sadly embrace ‘culture of free’
The Toronto Public Library, the largest in the country, has launched a new platform of penny-pinching ingenuity. The “Sell Books to the Library” program advertises to readers that it will buy used hardcover copies of bestselling titles listed on its website at the beginning of every month at $5 a piece.
This innocuous sounding program is but the latest manifestation of the socalled “culture of free” that has ravaged the media, music and book worlds. Without the FBI threatening $250,000-fines or five year prison terms for copyright infringement — as it does on DVDs — the value system that supports the prospect of just reward is eroded. Individuals and companies used to paying nothing for artists’ work now do so without compunction.
The culture of free is so endemic now that even artists avail themselves of it without a prick of conscience. Many of my own writer colleagues, the same ones complaining about shrinking advances and low payments for articles, coax free copies of books from publishers but also their peers, and use social networks to pass around articles placed behind firewalls.
“Only connect,” E.M. Forster might as easily have written of this web-enabled incongruity impoverishing writers and society. “Live in fragments no longer.”
But there is little chance of that happening when the inherent challenge of the Internet is to find the lowest possible price of any good whatsoever and the game’s ultimate reward is to pay nothing at all.
As web designers know, even three clicks where two will do is a cost that many are not willing to pay. From freeloaders leafing through books and magazines in Indigo armchairs to the Minister of Industry James Moore presenting himself as the consumer’s watchdog (oil and airline prices exempted), we have become a society expert in ways not to pay.
Alarmingly, this phenomenon of exploitation includes the very institutions whose raison d’être (you would have thought) demand a respect of writers and their product, acting not as custodians but instead pushing for their own chance to outwit circumstance and pay nothing. The amendment, in 2012, of Canadian copyright law to include “education” as the object of legitimate “fair dealing” has faculties across the country brazenly copying entire chapters or10 per cent of a book for the assembly of fat study guides, for which not a single writer is paid, meted out to hundreds of thousands of students.
And now the Toronto Public Library is zealously joining the cheapskates’ fray. The books it has listed on its “Sell Books to the Library” website page are not books that the public does not want; their authors are not ones who, the great lie of media and festivals, stand to benefit from extra publicity. No, the list is comprised of books so popular that the library is having a hard time meeting existing demand. December’s inaugural list includes, for instance, Canadian authors Margaret Atwood, David Bezmozgis, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Kathleen Reichs, Peter Robinson, Carrie Snyder, as well as Sean Mi- chaels and Miriam Toews, winners of this year’s Scotiabank Giller and Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction respectively.
Instead of ordering copies of books that furnish a royalty, and supporting the trade, as all honourable purchases do, the TPL is buying off the back of a public truck it has ushered into the courtyard, depriving writers and the companies that invest in them of their just reward. It can do so because it has decided that the lowest possible price to be paid is the right one.
All writers think of libraries as friends, in no small part because of the payments doled out by the Public Lending Right that compensates the author every time a book is borrowed. These payments are helpful in their own right, but also because they do that other thing that money does, which is to honour writers’ hard work and craft.
It would be nice to think that the “Sell Books to the Library” program is an aberration — a sop to a board intent on savings — and that Vickery Bowles, appointed City Librarian this week, will see fit to abolish it.
But until such time it would be appropriate for the TPL’s reading series to be boycotted by writers invited to speak until the library rescinds its bid to acquire books on the cheap and makes the formal commitment that any plan it pursues is done with the welfare of the writer in mind.
And in the meantime, I think I’ll print myself a line of tee shirts saying, I LOVE ART AND SO I PAY FOR IT.