Librarian Responses to Public Lending Rights in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom and Implications for the United States

Abstract

In 2019, the Author’s Guild of the United States announced their intent to pursue federal legislation for Public Lending Rights (PLR). PLR provide remuneration to authors, publishers, and/or illustrators for the circulation of their works in public, and sometimes school, libraries. A number of countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, instituted PLR in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper aims to investigate how public libraries in those three nations responded to the movement for PLR and how the philosophical concerns they raised may inform librarians in the United States.