Fee-Based Libraries Were Like Netflix for Books, 200 Years Ago

Fee-Based

Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Daniel Akst for The Wall Street Journal. As he explains, all-you-can-read lending services helped democratize reading. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Imagine a service that lets you read all the books you want for a flat monthly fee. Think of it as an unlimited literary buffet, spiced with a social dimension. It is bigger than most libraries, and nothing is ever checked out or missing.

If you’re objecting that such services already exist—in the form of Oyster, Scribd, Kindle Unlimited, and other “all you can eat” e-book ventures—you might well be an early adopter. But you’ve got nothing on Benjamin Franklin, who founded just such an enterprise in 1731.

Services like Oyster may represent the future of reading—and as is often the case, the future looks a lot like the past. All-you-can-eat Internet services such as Netflix and Spotify have been rewriting the rules for the consumption and production of movies and music. If Oyster and its kin do the same for books, they will only be reprising a role that their commercial ancestors played 200 years ago.

Back then, fee-based lending libraries democratized access to books, fueled the rise of a vital literary culture and gave women both a social space and some subtly subversive stuff to read. It happened because, in the 17th and 18th centuries, books were expensive, and public libraries (such as they were) typically admitted only public officials or clergymen. So a growing and literate middle class relied on a variety of rental and subscription models for access to volumes that people couldn’t otherwise afford.

In Philadelphia, for example, Franklin and his friends formed a club in 1727 to discuss “morals, politics or natural philosophy,” as its founder explained. Franklin tried to get the members to donate their books to a joint library, but they balked. So he got 50 subscribers to kick in 40 shillings each for the purpose of ordering books from London.

Amazon, Scribd and Oyster now sell all-you-can-eat ebook subscriptions. But Personal Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler found a free alternative with a much better digital selection: Your local public library.

Similar subscription libraries sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic. The serious books stocked by these literary and philosophical societies reflected the high-minded impulses of their founders. It often took money and connections to join these status-conscious outfits. In industrializing Britain, at least, many privileged people worried about what the hoi polloi might do with the power to read.

That power was spreading, and in an age short on other diversions, a growing literary industry was working feverishly to meet the demand for reading matter. Because literacy outpaced affluence, and because someone will always turn up to make a buck by providing things that people want, entrepreneurs, some of them already in the book business, launched the profit-oriented “circulating libraries” that are Oyster’s proper ancestors.

These ventures were open to anyone who could pay a relatively modest fee, often charged by the book, based on how long it was borrowed. Others offered patrons an all-you-can-eat approach for a flat annual fee—in some cases with pricier membership tiers allowing access to newer works or the borrowing of more volumes in a single visit.

The libraries were wildly successful. “In 1800 more than 200 commercial circulating libraries were open in Britain,” writes James Raven of the University of Essex, “more than double the number of private proprietary or subscription libraries.” By 1821, he adds, according to one contemporary magazine, 1,500 fiction lending libraries in Britain had 100,000 regular borrowers and the same number of occasional ones.

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Like today’s e-book subscription services, with their connections to Twitter and Facebook, old-world circulating libraries allowed birds of a social feather to flock together—and do a little shopping as well. Circulating libraries feature in the work of Jane Austen as places where a young woman could meet attractive military men, buy a parasol and get an education by reading. They were the next best thing, in other words, to the Internet.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Daniel Akst is a frequent WSJ Review contributor and the author, most recently, of Temptation: Self-Control in an Age of Excess.

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