"You would frequently hear that authors are paid royalties when their books are borrowed from a library. This claim is not true. "
I'm not sure what he's trying to say. In the UK, public libraries are part of the PLR scheme in which 1,000 annually-rotated libraries provide their lending details which are then scaled-up in a linear fashion and the royalties calculated on that basis.
It does mean that low-volume authors might not receive royalties one year if their loans were not sampled, but the concept is that they'd receive out-of-proportion royalties the next year when the sample set rotated.
The only reason a sample was used instead of direct measurement was due to the volume of data; automation could nowadays calculate per-author royalties on an all-branches basis.
Source: I summer-jobbed in a library back in the mid-90s and compiled the PLR statistics for the branch.
"You would frequently hear that authors are paid royalties when their books are borrowed from a library. This claim is not true. "
I'm not sure what he's trying to say. In the UK, public libraries are part of the PLR scheme in which 1,000 annually-rotated libraries provide their lending details which are then scaled-up in a linear fashion and the royalties calculated on that basis.
It does mean that low-volume authors might not receive royalties one year if their loans were not sampled, but the concept is that they'd receive out-of-proportion royalties the next year when the sample set rotated.
The only reason a sample was used instead of direct measurement was due to the volume of data; automation could nowadays calculate per-author royalties on an all-branches basis.
Source: I summer-jobbed in a library back in the mid-90s and compiled the PLR statistics for the branch.
https://www.plr.uk.com/libraryInformation/sampleLibLists.htm