In addition to political censorship and budget cuts, libraries are being undermined by rapacious digital licensing agreements
The US library system, once the model for the world, is under assault from politicians, rightwing activists and corporate publishers. Book bans are at record levels, and libraries across the country are facing catastrophic budget cuts, a fate only narrowly avoided by New York City’s public libraries this summer. In a separate line of attack, library collections are being squeezed by draconian licensing deals, and even sued to stop lending digitized books.
This war on libraries – and on the traditional values of equal opportunity, universal education and cultural preservation they represent – directly contravenes the will of the majority in the United States. Polls reveal that public support for libraries is as strong as ever. But the profession of librarianship has become a hazardous one, because of the actions of a hostile minority. It’s time to reverse course.
Centuries ago, publishers, lawmakers and business leaders understood the value to society of libraries, and of making books accessible to anyone curious enough to read them. Mindful of a long history of autocratic tyranny over the dissemination of books, Benjamin Franklin – a publisher and printer by trade – started the first subscription library in the US to spread knowledge widely.
Andrew Carnegie, a fierce capitalist, socialized the library system by helping thousands of towns to open their own libraries, “Free to the People”, as is carved in the stone of the Carnegie library in Pittsburgh. In 1908 the supreme court ruled and then in 1909 Congress secured provisions in the Copyright Act to ensure that lending libraries could operate freely. Yet in our times, these long-venerated legacies are under threat.
The traditional practice of libraries is to buy or acquire published materials, preserve and catalog them, and lend them widely and confidentially. When books were printed on paper, the laws governing these practices remained clear for more than a century. But now, in the digital age, every one of these functions has been denied to libraries, or recently even declared illegal in the United States.
Today, the ownership of digital books is routinely denied to libraries. Many books are offered to libraries in electronic form only, under restrictive temporary licenses; libraries can never own these e-books, but must pay for them over and over, as if they were Netflix movies.
Some publishers have even explicitly named libraries as direct economic competitors.
Digital books have been removed from libraries and edited without librarians’ knowledge or consent. Library patrons who borrow digital books can no longer have the expectation of privacy, with large publishers, distributors and e-book retailers snooping over the shoulder of every reader to build databases that can be sold or shared with advertisers, law enforcement, landlords or immigration agents.
