Let the library be a temple of culture. But it is also a shop where the result of the writer’s labor is handed out for free. In other words, the writer is deprived of the exchange value that he could use, among other things, to work more professionally as a writer.
The public library is one of the most important products of a civilized society, and also one of its preconditions. All the more reason, then, to ask from time to time how, in the present age, it fulfills the spirit and purpose of its mission. For one of the basic laws of organizational life is that every institution develops an instinct for self-preservation, which makes it appear self-evident in its own eyes. Self-evident things are easy to support, and it is pleasant to rage together at anyone who questions them.
One good question, bundling together many significant perspectives, is this: if the library system were created now from a clean slate, what would it become?
Books Must Be Free for the Reader, Must They?
One easy answer is that library books must be free for everyone, so that literary culture is not hidden behind a wall of wealth. That idea is easy to accept. But it is much harder to accept, for example, the idea that bread made by a baker must not be behind a paywall. Surely bread too should be free—or perhaps payable only for the most impatient between eight and nine in the morning, after which anyone could come and take it for nothing. Surely bread must be a civil right! In a civilized state!
Something here does not add up.
How does a book differ from other goods that require human labor? How many citizens would be willing to give the products of their own work into free distribution in such a way that it eats into the maker’s income? For although part of a book’s first-year income comes from library purchases, every copy that goes to a library also reduces, in the longer run, the number of possible buyers. If the book is one whose life and readability are long, the sums involved for the writer may be significant.
The Library Raises Readers, Does It?
For ages it has been argued that the library raises readers, and that for this reason the free distribution of books in public libraries also supports book sales. I wonder. Around the world it has been observed many times, on the contrary, that the free distribution of some good merely increases its free use and people’s unwillingness to pay for it later either. In many developing countries, for example, there is a serious problem in that when people have once been able to get water teeming with parasites and bacteria for free from a puddle, they are reluctant to pay even for good water once society builds a water-supply network.
And the issue is not only, or even mainly, that people cannot afford it, because electricity and healthy water always increase a community’s wellbeing, work opportunities, and income level. But once people have learned that something is free, they do not want to see that even this good is made and paid for by someone, by investing time, supplies, and money in it.
If a free library system is justified on the grounds that it teaches the habit of reading, then it would be reasonable to lend books free of charge at most to children, but not to adults. The habit of reading is almost always born in childhood. If someone did not learn it then, it generally does not suddenly appear at an older age.
Literature Civilizes, Does It?
The free availability of books in libraries has also been justified by their civilizing effect. But how many books are truly “civilizing” in any meaningful sense? Most fiction is entertainment and pastime, just like television series and films. Some books are more intelligent than others, and someone may indeed gain a new insight from one of them, but few people read them for that reason. If the habit of reading truly arose from a need for cultivation, the list of the public’s favorite books would look quite different.
Why Does a Good Thing Cost?
In society in general, all products have some commercial price. They must have a price so that the different work contributions of different people become commensurable in terms of their exchange value, and the different goods of two people can change owners in some defined proportion. So that Pekka’s twenty minutes of labor on a building site gives him, at the supermarket checkout, the right to take home a kilo of pork. That is how it works. One may ask whether it is, in every respect, the socially ideal model, but no better one has been invented.
Let the library be a temple of culture. But it is also a shop where the result of the writer’s labor is handed out for free. In other words, the writer is deprived of the exchange value that he could use, among other things, to work more professionally as a writer.
The distribution system of books is, in any case, developing all the time in a direction where, with the exception of a few successful authors, the ordinary writer’s chance of receiving reasonable compensation for the work he has done is weakening. That cannot be in the interest of culture. It is sad that society’s library system contributes to this development, when its purpose is, presumably, the opposite: to support culture and civilization.
Literature Too Does Not Flourish on Starvation Wages
In the long run, literary culture can flourish only in an environment where the book is not a bulk commodity handed out for free, and where the writer’s lot is not to do his work for starvation wages. I have just read Helvi Hämäläinen’s magnificent memoir Ketunkivellä, and I was rather astonished to find that even in the home of a writer of Hämäläinen’s caliber, want often came visiting. What if her work had never come into being because of that?
Of course books can be scribbled alongside other work, as a hobby, and that is happening more and more often. But the history shows that the greatest heights of literary culture are reached when a person is able to develop his literary ability and vision as a profession.
Of course a book is always at the mercy of the market, and in principle that is how it should be. Either readers like a book or they do not, and they vote with their feet. Naturally that is not a measure of the book’s quality except in the economic sense. But it is certainly in the interest of society and culture that if there is demand for a writer’s works, he/she has the opportunity to live by his work full-time, without society in some way tripping him up. Yet that is precisely what the library system does by distributing new books for free. From the point of view of culture, it is unnecessary and harmful. It raises the threshold of the writer’s profession much higher than it needs to be.
Society does, at least in the Nordic countries, pay the writer a library compensation, but its size is symbolic compared with the fact that, thanks to libraries, nowadays only the most impatient people buy a book, while the greater part wait until they can get their hands on it from the library once the worst queues for the new release have passed. It eats away at writers’ livelihood. A fact is a fact.
The Library System Was Built in a Finland of Poverty
A completely free library was understandable in a Finland with large poor sections of the population, but despite the contrary efforts of many recent governments, we no longer live in such a country. Most people can afford many things stranger than books.
As I write this, a 0.33-liter can of beer costs 1.76 euros in an S Group shop. A single copy of the afternoon paper Ilta-Sanomat costs 2.20 euros, a single copy of Helsingin Sanomat 4.80 euros, and a 50-gram Fazer Geisha Crunchy chocolate bar 1.35 euros. A cinema ticket typically costs 8–15 euros, a theatre ticket 30–40 euros, and a ticket to a musical as much as twice that. Tickets for international summer rock tours can cost large three-digit sums.
In this world, is a price of a few euros for reading a book unreasonable? Who has the nerve to say so without blinking? Shame on you.
A good book can be enjoyed for hours, a thick book for dozens of hours, and even after reading it may go on living in the mind as a resource, perhaps for the rest of one’s life. If someone feels that, as a personal investment, this is not worth as much as a chocolate bar smacked down in five minutes, or a single can of beer, then by all means. Everyone makes his own life choices.
Why Does the Library Distribute New Books?
Perhaps the largest question in this context is whether libraries really must release books into free distribution immediately after their publication, while their most favorable selling period in the new-book market is still underway. Does maintaining the level of civilization of the Finnish people require that Larry Reader absolutely must get hold, free of charge and already in the publication year, of Andy Author’s novel Storms of Mexico, about Tina Tenderheart experiencing a romance abroad? What if the library took it into free distribution only after five years or after ten years? Would the level of culture and civilization collapse?
Or could one even imagine that it might rise a little, when many readers might perhaps glance again at the shelves of older books? Literature is a cumulative cultural treasure, although this present literary ecosystem, which overemphasizes new releases, rots away that insight. Books of genuine cultural significance form only a small proportion of all books, and most of them were published more than ten years ago. This is only mathematics, but it is true in every age.
I could easily imagine that at least the borrowing of a new book from a library would be subject to a fee. I could also imagine that the author himself would be allowed to decide when his published book is released for library use, and at what price. Technically, building such a system cannot be any kind of problem.
A Graduated Lending Compensation
In the prevailing literary ecosystem, most of a book’s retail price goes to actors other than the writer, and from one book sold in a bookstore the writer typically receives, for example, about three euros, or something of that order. I could easily imagine a system in which the lending compensation for a book would be graduated, so that borrowing a new book in its first year would cost those three euros, in the second year two euros, and in the third year and thereafter one euro, paid by the borrower. Since books are, in reality, very differently priced, that average price would of course have to be replaced by the actual price the writer would receive for that particular book. And if the lending compensation were one euro higher, the library too would get its share.
The state would save the library-compensation money, writers’ finances would gain a firmer footing, and not a single citizen would be deprived of inexpensive reading hours.
The Library Could Concentrate on Older Literature
Or libraries could simply stop distributing books less than ten years old. If a library waited ten years before releasing books at a lending price of two or three euros, it would also save a great deal of money, since even in the case of major bestsellers it would not need to acquire such large quantities, and those funds could be distributed more evenly among a larger number of titles.
Now This Will Make People Angry
I know very well that thinking aloud in this way will immediately make rage rise in many people. But I have not seen practical and robust reasons for the claim that the free distribution of books is in the interest of literary culture today, under these conditions. Ideological arguments, on the other hand, may always be valued for what they are worth. Ideas are cheap; reality is expensive.
I do understand that when one has received jam for free for a long time, it is annoying perhaps to have to pay even a little for it someday. But in the literary ecosystem, that small sum can make a great difference to the writer’s livelihood. If writers begin distributing their books themselves, their purchase price for the reader can be much lower than now, once the intermediaries are out of the picture.
The mass distribution of books through monthly subscription services is another matter. Some writers may like it, even if it brings in hardly any income. After all, books are in any case already being distributed for free in libraries. But the compensation a writer receives from monthly services is often even smaller than the library compensation. And the library compensation, as I write this, is 25 cents per loan. Agreeing to that is, for the writer, mainly a surrender before the fact that a book no longer has any value compared, for example, with a newspaper or a chocolate bar.
