Since the last entry received a lot of comments, it is time to burst the popularity bubble. There are a number of incredibly tedious subjects I have been thinking of documenting on the blog, but since I am bad and lazy I have been dragging my feet. The first tedious entry has precious little to do with homosexuality. It is about libraries.
In particular, Dr Spo (the dear!) once blogged about public libraries. That entry (or one like it) prompted a thought experiment. Say that public libraries did not already exist. In our current neoliberal economic system, would we be able to invent them? Would they survive? What would they look like?
I do not have full answers to these counterfactuals, but I have some boring thoughts, which I shall proceed to unload upon you.
How Did We Get Public Libraries?
Uncle Wikipedia provides lots of history around public libraries. It turns out that there are many different kinds of libraries. Some charged membership fees, or were otherwise restricted to specific groups of people. Some libraries circulated material to patrons; others chained all material within the grounds. Many libraries charged subscription fees until the 1800s, when public libraries similar to the ones we are familiar with today became popular.
In reading through Uncle Wikipedia’s summary, a few things stood out to me:
- An 1835 attempt to mandate public libraries came courtesy of the temperance movement, so that the masses would have a third place other than pubs and bars.
- Public libraries have been linked to popular culture for a long time. Unlike scholarly libraries full of monographs, public libraries harbored such harmful public entertainments like novels and periodicals.
- From early days publishers worried that public libraries would cut into their profits, and opposed their existence on that basis.
The elephant in the room here is Andrew Carnegie and the other robber-baron oligarchs brandwashing their images via philanthropy. In America Carnegie was a leading figure in establishing public libraries. Without his brandwashing many municipalities might not have established public libraries at all.
However, it is worth noting that Carnegie had strict rules that although he would provide construction capital for libraries, responsibility for operating costs fell exclusively to the host municipalities. Carnegie got the credit, and ratepayers footed the bill.
All this leads to my suspicion that widespread public library adoption were not in fact inevitable. If Carnegie and other oligarchs had chosen a different target for their philanthropy (colonizing Mars, say, or converting the heathens to Christianity) then it may have been much more difficult to get public libraries established.
Could We Still Invent Public Libraries?
That was then. What about now?
Thankfully, we no longer live in the Gilded Age, and there are no more oligarchs trying to brandwash their images. If there were, then it is conceivable that oligarch-philanthropists could somehow fund public libraries. But I do not think modern-era library movements would look the same as libraries do today.
I feel the biggest difference would be means testing. Public libraries in the 19th- and 20th-century versions were intended to be universal. A rich person could get a library card and use it as freely as a poor person (provided the poor person had a home, I guess. Homeless people do not have home addresses and thus in many places do not qualify for library cards). Publishers have never been happy that public libraries can purchase books and lend them to rich people who would otherwise be able to purchase books on their own, and as publishing has grown more electronic they are doing something about it.
As this Indicator podcast on library economics explains, the big difference is licensing. A library that purchases a physical book has traditionally been able to loan that book out. The tradeoff is that library users are disgusting, and generally books would degrade after being circulated a few dozen times, prompting the library either to drop the book or purchase a new copy. E-books are electronic and can in principle be loaned out many times, but e-books are licensed, not sold, so libraries do not have the first-sale doctrine to protect them. Thus the publishers (who are in no way an oligopoly themselves) restrict what libraries can do with their e-books. The podcast says that many libraries are forced to re-purchase books every two years regardless of how many times they are loaned out. In addition, libraries must only loan one copy of each book they license at a time (which is why we might lose the Internet Archive). The idea is that rich people using the library will see the enormous number of holds on popular titles, and then be persuaded to license their own copy from Mr Bezos.
It gets worse. Publishers saw that ebooks were being signed out of libraries at alarming rates, so they took further measures. Macmillan publishing put an embargo on sales of popular new ebooks to libraries. For two months, libraries were prohibited from licensing the hottest latest books, so that rich people would see that their preferred titles were not at the library an go pay Mr Bezos instead. (Macmillan — bless their hearts — retracted their embargo once the pandemic started, but now that COVID is over (har har) I expect it will return in one form or another.)
Neither of these moves are directly means testing, but they amount to the same thing. Libraries might provide some access to popular media for people, but the experience for Poors is degraded, and people with money are expected to pony up cash for their entertainment. The embargo is especially galling to me, but it is not surprising.
Okay, but in the Good Old Days publishers hated public libraries too, and yet we have them. Why would things be different now? Couldn’t oligarch-philanthropists lobby governments to give ebooks the same protections physical books have? They could, but they won’t. Carnegie got rich from steel. Other robber barons profited from railroads. None of these directly competed with libraries. If there were oligarchs in modern society, they would likely come from the tech world, which deals (and profits!) from data and intellectual property. It is not in their interests to give public libraries more power.
Instead we get things like Free Basics by Facebook, which is Meta’s charming initiative to get Internet access to the poor — degraded Internet access that for the first few years included Facebook (natch), Uncle Wikipedia (for brandwashing) and few other services. In response to criticism Meta later broadened access, but it is still low-bandwidth, low-quality access to limited resources intended for poor people.
My own belief is that means testing (either implicit or explicit) condemns services to mediocrity. Services stay healthy when those with voice and power use them. That has been the case for public libraries traditionally (even upper-middle class people exposed their darling childrens to the wonder of library cards) but this may be a historical accident that would be difficult to replicate under modern conditions.
What Are Public Libraries For?
If you have been to a public library in the last decade you may have noticed they have changed. They are no longer just about books and quiet study spaces. Now they have 3D printers and cafés and social services and virtual reality stations. Does this make sense? What is a library for?
Uncle Wikipedia states the following criteria for public libraries:
- they are supported by taxes
- they are governed by a board
- they are open to all
- nobody is coerced to use them
- they provide services without charge
These are good principles, but they don’t answer the question. What services? Traditionally we think of libraries as providing access to books. Why books? Books contain information. So maybe libraries provide access to information, which explains why they have tax clinics and host public meetings and provide Internet terminals.
I feel there is even more to modern libraries than this. Libraries provide access not only to information, but culture. That culture might be in the form of information or entertainment. The underlying principle is that everybody in the community deserves access to culture, which is why some libraries provide day passes to museums and campsites.
Public Libraries and Censorship
As some of you may have noticed, there is a culture war going on. Our next president Ron DeSantis is leading the charge, but many other fine states (Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and others) have been conducting suspiciously coordinated campaigns against trans people, drag queens, and reproductive rights.
Libraries have not been exempt from this, of course. There has been much furor about Drag Queen Story Hours — sigh — being held at public libraries, and of course our next president Ron DeSantis has been busy ensuring that school libraries are cleared of free and woke material. This has prompted shock and horror from progressives, and many comparisons to Nazis burning books.
However, as I have previously blogged, librarians cull their stacks, although apparently they prefer the term weeding. There are many defenses of this horrifying practice, but given that libraries are cultural resources and not cultural archives, weeding is seen to be a necessary practice. For the most part, libraries do not see weeding their stacks as censorship, even though the criteria used to discard “obsolete” books are frequently cultural.
Progressives like to proclaim that book bans are universally bad, but I am not so sure. Germany (specifically Bavaria) used copyright to limit access to Mein Kampf for decades. If you don’t like direct appeals to Nazism, how about The Turner Diaries, virulently racist novel that influenced Timothy McVeigh, among others. The problem with cultural works is that they can be persuasive, but are not obligated to be truthful. Our culture war is about deciding which cultural artifacts are acceptable and which ones aren’t, and the two sides of the debate make remarkably similar arguments. (Observe how we mock right-wingers for doing their research via Facebook memes.)
I ain’t no philosopher, but my tendency is to lean towards free-speech absolutism. I very much acknowledge that persuasive yet harmful works exist, and that misinformation spreads much more rapidly than truth, and that we are learning to hijack our reptile brains to spread bad information more quickly, and that misinformation has already caused many concrete harms (how many lives have the novels of Ayn Rand ruined?). At the same time, I am not convinced it should be up to the state to determine what is acceptable vs unacceptable discourse, because the state has a vested interest in protecting itself from criticism. So I am mostly against these bills that want to restrict what public libraries and school libraries are allowed to stock in their libraries.
But just because a library should be allowed to stock certain materials does not imply that it should be obligated to. Libraries have finite resources. They are not capable of providing access to all cultural works. So some things will by necessity be left out. The tricky question is what should stay and what should go. Should the library membership have the final word? Then maybe calls for public libraries to clear their shelves of LGBTQ+ material are okay, because a significant fraction of the local citizenry demands such. If we are going to insist on minority rights so that a bunch of bigoted anti-gay citizens cannot override some queer person’s ability to access LGBTQ+ material, then do we extend that right to TERFs by allowing virulently anti-trans material (not all of which is authored by JK Rowling)? The obvious temptation is to allow those works which are supported by our political tribe ban those which our political tribe finds offensive, but that is exactly what future president Ron DeSantis is doing, and we do not like that much at all.
The kneejerk answer to this is “if you don’t like it, don’t read it” but then it should be fine for libraries to stock materials that contain information that will be used to harm others.
The Internet throws another monkeywrench into this discussion. Internet access is not universal, but it is widespread, and people can now access much of the information online that they once would have gotten from the library. Is it okay for libraries to not stock materials that are available for free online? (The Turner Diaries would be one of those, at least for now.) My own gut feeling is that libraries need not worry so much about omitting easily-accessible information, but even this gets tricky. What do we do when the easily-accessible information exists, but is lost in a sea of bad information?
Libraries have been dealing with these kinds of questions for decades now. I am not sure they have the best answers to them, but their answers are no doubt better than mine, and possibly better than those of Republican lawmakers pushing divisive wedge issues. My tendency is to trust the librarians, but given my unwholesome proclivities you would expect me to say that.