Printed in Newsroom
March 26, 2025
Riley Chance claims in his angry story in ReadingRoom about the failures of the Public Lending Right (PLR) that the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) and its members are happy with and doing nicely from the current PLR system. Au contraire. The lack of any progress to the PLR through successive governments is exasperating, disheartening, a thorn in our flesh and a hole in our wallets.
Books remain the only cultural item people expect to get for free. We buy tickets to the theatre, ballet, bands, dance, Te Matatini, orchestra and opera; we pay to view films, games, TV series and music on streaming platforms. Yet writers are expected to give much of their work away for free, to public libraries, in acknowledgement of the public good and societal benefits in reading for pleasure, information, education, and literacy.
The teachers and librarians that champion this free access ‘for the public good’ are paid to do their good work. So are the bureaucrats who administer the scheme. As for writers, the PLR cheques sent out at year’s end are an essential component of their incomes. To quote one writer: “If the PLR cheque doesn’t come in December, we don’t have Christmas.” But the cheques are small, and are drawn from a small fund.
The NZSA campaigned for over 40 years for the original establishment of PLR. The PLR/Authors Fund, if linked to CPI, would now be around $6million. Instead, it remains at a mere $2.4m – and PLR remains outdated and unloved. The lack of political will to do the right thing, over so many years, suggests disdain for NZ writers.
In 2021 free access to books was greatly increased through the Marrakesh Treaty – from about 8% of the population who are visually impaired to the 24% who identify with some form of disability in the census. Engineers are paid to record, and narrators paid to read audio books for RNZ and Blind and Low Vision NZ, yet nothing is paid to the writer. At the time Marrakesh was extended, the MBIE minister assured us that the PLR would take care of it, but writers are still waiting. This is fundamental injustice.
Our requests to meet with DIA Minister Brooke van Velden remain unanswered.
For two decades NZSA has advocated for an Educational Lending Right (ELR) scheme to compensate access to NZ books in school libraries; any inclusion now is already 20 years behind the establishment of an ELR in Australia. The NZSA has also called for Digital Lending Rights to compensate digital borrowing through e-book and audio library loans. NZ Public Libraries have fast-tracked to fever pitch digital borrowing programmes and reported 8.9 million loans of e-books and audiobooks in 2023-2024, but PLR offers no compensation to NZ writers for their digital editions.
The PLR scheme has been under ‘urgent review’ since 2017. The National Library of NZ, who currently administer the scheme, called for submissions in 2019, then commissioned Allen & Clarke to report recommendations in 2020. Since that time, despite extensive lobbying to the Department of Internal Affairs, the report has languished and none of the recommendations have advanced.
Riley Chance’s ReadingRoom story took particular issue with the survey count method used to administer the PLR. National Library surveys selected libraries every 2 years, then extrapolates that to estimate how many copies of a book are held across all libraries. In an age of digital catalogues and collective management software systems, writers query why the count is still back-of-envelope, and not hard data.
The current regulation stipulates 50 copies must be held in libraries for a book to qualify for PLR, and we have long lobbied for this to be dropped. Digital access to a book in every NZ library makes nonsense of the threshold. Two hundred fewer authors, than a decade ago, receive any PLR payment due to the threshold regulation.
The PLR is a just and robust mechanism to pay authors for the use of their wares. But its review is urgent. We continue to wait, and wait, and wait, to be heard by Brooke van der Velden.
About: NZSA is the principal organisation for over 1800 writers. NZSA provides professional development programmes and collaborates across the book sector to make NZ writing and NZ writers more visible, and champions fair reward. NZSA is a not-for-profit incorporated society and a registered charity.
More information about PLR HERE
