Public library lending

The annual ‘best seller’ list for UK public libraries has just been published.

Much was made of the enduring popularity of the novels of Danielle Steel, whose books have been featured in the lists for each of the last 30 years. Her books were borrowed almost a million times last year alone.

Jack Malvern, writing in The Times, interpreted this as the ‘British reading public’ showing what they think of literary critics & cultural commentators who mock her ‘formulaic stories’.

Well maybe.

But that figure needs to be seen in the context of the total number of loans made by UK public libraries last year.

The novels of Danielle Steel accounted for  0.3% of a total of more than one quarter of a billion loans (287,505,000 to be more precise – rather more than the 209,000,000 books bought by consumers in 2011 according to figures from the Publishers Association).

The best seller lists are compiled from figures which are used to make Public Lending Right (PLR) payments to authors. From which we can calculate that, with a total of £6.4m at a rate of 6.2p per loan, only some 100 million (roughly one-third of all library loans) attract the payment. Part of the gap is explained by the fact that there is a cap of £6,600 on the payment to any one author (ie they are not paid for more than about 1 million loans of their books in any one year), and the rest is made up of books by authors who do not qualify for PLR.

Links
What is PLR?
CIPFA national library survey