The Case For and Against Public Lending Right

to do with patronage or charity whereby subsidies are given to meritor-ious but unpopular authors, or to young writers of promise, or to indigent authors; it is a matter of natural justice, a right based ulti-mately on copyright to fair payment for use due to authors for the multiple exploitation of their books through libraries.’ Almost from the outset of thePLR campaign, the focus of attention has been upon the public library because, it has been claimed, unlike educational libraries where books are used in the main for study or reference purposes on the premises, the public library acts as a book distributor or free bookseller, with the result that there has been a decline in the sales of hardback books to private buyers and the incomes of authors and publishers are no longer even remotely related to the size of the readership of their joint products. ’ Authors have been character-ized as slave laborers in the service of what is in effect a “huge national-ized industry for the lending of books which has undermined and almost wiped out the private enterprise of selling books to individual owner^." ^ Without the introduction of PLR, it is asserted, the native British professional writer will soon be extinct. Libraries will be reduced to offering a service based on lending books by British writers of the past, academics whose writing is a spin-off from and subsidized by their secure employment, and North American writers. U1 timately