Register your books to get paid for lending

IF YOU HAVE words or pictures published in a book, you should register that book for Public Lending Right (PLR) by 30 June. The PLR website is partly back up after the British Library, which runs it, was hacked in the autumn.

A sculpture in the foyer of the British Library St Pancras site, showing a chained-up library book from the Olden Days, takes on new meaning

Image © Matt Salusbury

Your existing password will not work. Select the "Forgot your password?" option at the link following plr.bl.uk/login to get a new one.

PLR is payable to book authors - including illustrators and translators - because you are the author - even if you have been pressed to sign away copyright. In other words, in the UK PLR is quite separate from copyright - as it is in all countries that have PLR, except Germany and Austria.

PLR compensates you for copies that would have been sold, had the book not been lent out by a library. The payments are calculated from a survey of selected libraries, extrapolated statistically.

© Mike Holderness

Public Lending Right plr.bl.uk