The campaign to rein in the rampant freeloading at local libraries continues apace. Ron Charles cites an Authors' Guild report saying "Almost two-thirds of readers obtain books for free — whether from friends, personal collections, libraries, pirate sites, or other free sources" and asks "are affluent library users impoverishing authors?" Well, no. But let's take a step back. I agree with Doug Johnson that authors deserve a decent living. If they don't get one, though, it's not because of scofflaws like me, it's because we've create this scrape-to-get-by economy that turns everything good into a struggle to find a business model and to make ends meet. We're not going to address author poverty by eliminating libraries; at most, we'll do nothing but make a few billionaires richer.
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