Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion

Re:Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Tr... by mattmanser on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @08:24AM (#1062037)

To put this in perspective, in the UK (from http://www.plr.uk.com/):

The Rate Per Loan has now been confirmed and has increased for the first time in three years to 6.29 pence

£0.0629 is somewhat different to the £7.99 that the average paperback costs in the UK these days.

Also:

Over 23,000 writers ... receive PLR payments each year

Which seems a very small number to me.

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Re:Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Tr... by jgrahamc on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @09:13AM (#1062118)

A better comparison would be to compare that royalty rate with what the author gets from sales. A 'typical' rate would be 10% of what the publisher gets. If the retailer sells the book for £8 they'll keep something like 40% so the publisher will keep £4.80 and the author will get £0.48.

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Re:Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Tr... by mbreese on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @11:06AM (#1062385)

Not to mention that a single book can be loaned multiple times over the year. So, if you have a pay per loan rate of £0.0629, it would only have be loaned 8 times over the year to match the rate of one sale (for the author). Not to mention that they probably get the royalty from the first sale as well (or maybe not as part of the pay per loan agreement - I have no idea).

So, the pay per loan rate is probably pretty good.

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Re:Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Tr... by eru on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @01:04PM (#1062708)

There was a discussion in France, where the did not used to have a pay per loan system in the libraries and some people wanted to introduce one. I do not know however, what came out of it..

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