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Canada's Public Lending Right Program Canada’s Public Lending Right Program Program Design, International Comparisons, and the Impact of Technology Research paper prepared for the Canada Council for the Arts by Roy MacSkimming March 2012 The contents of this paper are the responsibility of its author, Roy MacSkimming, and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Canada Council for the Arts or the Public Lending Right Commission. 2 Contents Executive Summary 1 Background 2 Program Design and Evolution 3 International Comparisons 4 Impact of Technology 5 Conclusion Appendices Table 1: PLR Historical Summary, 1986-2011 Table 2: PLR Payments by Province and Author’s Language, 2010-11 List of Persons Interviewed and Consulted Bibliography 3 4 Executive Summary By examining Canada’s Public Lending Right (PLR) program from three different perspectives, this paper attempts to collate and analyze available information and provide domestic and international context for the program. Following some background to the paper, Part 2, Program Design and Evolution, shows that PLR’s initial design adopted in 1986 has been maintained with relatively few changes over the past 26 years. The most significant design modifications occurred in the library sampling process in 2004-05 and through introduction of the Growth Management Strategy (GMS) in 2009-10. That strategy was the PLR Commission’s response to the most formidable challenge facing it throughout its history: relentless annual growth in authors and titles participating in the program. That growth has not been accompanied by commensurate increases in the program budget, particularly in the past 10 years. Hence, although the GMS has contributed to bolstering payments to authors for more recently published titles, the real purchasing power of average PLR payments has been steadily eroding for a decade. Part 3, International Comparisons, situates Canada’s PLR program in the context of 29 working PLR programs around the world. Since no two national PLR schemes are exactly alike, Canada’s system bears many similarities to these other programs yet exhibits certain differences. Canada is one of seven countries practicing a holdings-based system, whereas 19 other systems are loans-based, and two are based on annual library book purchases. In terms of average payment to authors and payment per capita of population, Canada’s program is comparable to those of several other countries, including Belgium, France, New Zealand and the U.K. However, it is considerably less generous than several other systems, in countries such as Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Part 4, Impact of Technology, shows that digital technology has been instrumental in maintaining the efficiency and lean administrative structure of Canada’s PLR program. In particular, it has made possible improvements in the library sampling process. In the near term, technology will continue to be central to the program as it explores the potential for expanding services to authors, such as introducing online registration and electronic direct deposit. Most significantly, the program must come to grips with the rapidly growing presence of eBooks in Canadian library collections, as the PLRC works toward implementing its intent of including eBooks in the program by 2013-14. It is hoped that the paper will be a useful tool for both the Public Lending Right Commission and the Canada Council for the Arts in informing and facilitating future program design. 5 1 Background This research paper was commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts as a sequel to “The Policy Foundations of Public Lending Right in Canada,” a paper by the same author (Canada Council for the Arts, November 2011). The earlier paper dealt with the origins of the Public Lending Right (PLR) program in Canadian public policy. Covering the period leading up to the program’s adoption by the federal government in 1986, it documented the policy development process and the roles played by the various stakeholders. The paper established PLR’s core objective as stated in the Treasury Board document authorizing the program: “to compensate authors for the use of their works through Canadian libraries.” An ancillary purpose stated by Treasury Board was “to increase the revenues and improve the financial situation of Canadian writers and give public recognition to their important contribution to protecting Canada’s cultural identity.” The paper concluded that the following principles and needs fundamentally shaped the program and its mandate: • The principles of fairness, equity, and recognition of a public service provided by authors, for which a public benefit is paid; and • The needs to improve authors’ financial return from their creative work, recognize their contribution to Canadian culture, and reinforce their creativity. The present paper continues this examination of Canada’s PLR program by focusing on three key areas of interest: 1. The initial PLR program design and its subsequent evolution over 25 years; 2. Comparisons with international counterparts of Canada’s PLR program; 3. The present and future impacts of technology on the program. The paper’s intent is to collate and analyze information: to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Research for the paper builds upon research conducted for the earlier study and also includes: a review of Public Lending Right Commission (PLRC) documents recording developments in the program’s design and evolution, e.g. Commission minutes, annual reports and statistical reports; a review of PLR program evaluations; an examination of various conference proceedings, including several international PLR conferences; a study of the comprehensive analysis of PLR programs worldwide on the PLR International Network website; a recent report prepared for the PLRC, “EBooks and Public Lending Right in Canada,” as well as articles on ebooks in Canada and internationally; and personal interviews with PLR program staff, former and current PLR Commission members, and other individuals in Canada and abroad knowledgeable about the paper’s three areas of interest. Research sources are identified in the appendices. Where particular sources of information are cited in the text, the source may be identified in square brackets directly following the information. 6 2 Program Design and Evolution “Managing program growth, then, is our most formidable challenge, given the expectation…of government restraint.” Douglas Burnet Smith, PLRC Chair Proceedings of the 1995 International PLR Conference Overview As described in “The Policy Foundations of Public Lending Right in Canada,” the PLR program design was greatly influenced by the work of the Consultative Committee on Payment for Public Use. Convened by the Canada Council from 1977 to 1981, the Consultative Committee was created to examine ways of paying authors for the free lending of their books in Canadian libraries – a policy implemented in some other countries under the rubric of Public Lending Right. The Committee had a mandate to advise the Council on the feasibility, design and implementation of a national program. Committee members included a representative balance among the stakeholder groups most immediately concerned: Anglophone and Francophone authors, librarians and book publishers. Long before the federal government committed budgetary resources to PLR, the Consultative Committee developed a program framework. It examined international precedents; conducted an extensive national survey of writers in both official languages to determine potentially eligible authors and titles; conceptualized the program architecture; and tested the feasibility of implementing the program in cooperation with a sample of libraries across the country. In mid-1981 the Canada Council board approved the Consultative Committee’s program recommendations and submitted them for consideration by the federal government through the Minister of Communications. Government authorization and funding for PLR took another five years, requiring intense lobbying by national writers’ organizations. That long campaign is often characterized as “a crusade,” as founding PLRC Chair Andreas Schroeder called it in his speech to the 2011 annual general meeting of the Writers’ Union of Canada, “Canada’s PLR Program: The Untold Story”. The Consultative Committee’s advance work enabled PLR to be up and running in a remarkably short time – a matter of months – once the program was established. The newly formed Public Lending Right Commission (see “Governance” below) basically accepted the structure designed by the Committee. Like other longstanding arts and culture programs, PLR’s design has subsequently become modified over time. But considering that PLR has operated for a quarter-century – the first annual payments to authors were issued in March 1987 – its design has remained relatively stable. Although the criteria and methodology have evolved somewhat, the program’s broad lines have not changed a great deal since the program’s inception. 7 Constant pressure on the program’s ability to maintain its level of payments to authors has triggered the most significant design changes. Budgetary increases have not kept pace with relentless annual growth in the numbers of authors and titles eligible to participate. The PLRC’s most substantive response to these pressures has been the “Growth Management Strategy” introduced in 2009-10, to be discussed below. Participation growth between 1987 and 2011 more than quadrupled the number of registered authors, by a factor
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