Libraries are won­der­ful places…but they’re a lousy deal for writ­ers. When a library buys your book, you get one roy­alty. Then hun­dreds of peo­ple get to read your book for free, earn­ing you no roy­al­ties at all. The Cana­dian gov­ern­ment rec­og­nizes this essen­tial unfair­ness and takes steps to reim­burse writ­ers through a pro­gram called Pub­lic Lend­ing Right, oper­ated and funded by the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts. Every year, the PLR sends a team out to inves­ti­gate dozens of ran­domly selected libraries across the coun­try. They search the cat­a­logs for copies of your books, and every time they find one they record it as a “hit” and pay you a set amount for each. This year a sin­gle hit was worth an aver­age of about $44, based on how long the book had been reg­is­tered with the PLR. The checks arrive promptly every Feb­ru­ary, and can be pleas­antly sub­stan­tial. 41 coun­tries have some sys­tem to reim­burse writ­ers for books in libraries. Coun­tries with­out PLR plans include the United States, and all of South Amer­ica, Asia and Africa. The PLR is just one exam­ple of the many ways var­i­ous nations in the world seek to sup­port the arts—and pro­vide tan­gi­ble assis­tance and encour­age­ment to their cit­i­zens who work in the arts and the humanities—because they rec­og­nize the vital national impor­tance of these activities.

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