Register your books to get paid for lending by 30/06/24 - website is partly back

Public Lending Right gone wrong

BACK ON 28 October the British Library (BL) announced: "we are currently experiencing technical issues affecting our website. We apologise for the inconvenience and hope to resolve it as soon as possible." Not many such announcements merit a write-up in the New Yorker...

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

One of the consequences is that Public Lending Right payments are delayed and no-one seems to know when they will arrive. Book authors, illustrators and translators are entitled to payments for lending of their work by libraries. UK law says you are entitled to Public Lending Right (PLR) payments because you are the author, regardless of what contracts you signed governing copyright in your work. Since 2021 PLR has been administered by the BL.

In early December one book author commented, in response to an email from the BL: "This could be a severe financial shock for many authors who rely on plr to pay the winter bills.". She asked: "If a big delay happens it would be better if they just paid out what they paid out last year and then adjusted another time.". The Freelance will be pursuing this with the BL when we can get hold of a spokeshuman.

There are of course further ramifications. You should, under data protection law, have been notified by the BL that on 20 November a hacking group offered 490,191 files stolen from the BL for sale on the dark Web. These may include some details of your account. See www.bl.uk/cyber-incident

The BL told Sam Knight, writing in the New Yorker, that it hoped to get its digital catalogue back up by 15 January. Meanwhile, as Sam notes, the library resembles that in the Jorge Luis Borges story "The Library of Babel", which contains all possible books and therefore is unusable except for serendipitous browsing.

Update 7 January 2024

The BL told the Guardian that it is "making good progress towards issuing UK PLR payments before the end of March, in accordance with government legislation. We recognise the importance of these payments for authors, illustrators, translators, narrators and everyone who contributes to books and are planning to issue a further update, with a finalised timeline, by the end of this month."

© Mike Holderness

Cyber incident update bl.uk

Update 17 January 2024

We heard back from the BL Press Office. They referred us to this blog announcing the return of the digital catalogue on 15 January, and referring to the above news. We responded that we'd take that as a "no" concerning interim payments.

Update 29 January 2024

We forgot to mention that the distribution that the BL still hopes to make by the end of March will not include Irish PLR. No word on when that might arrive.

Update 12 February 2024

The BL now says that it expects to distribute:

• Irish statements distributed week commencing 29 January 2024;
• Irish payments between 19 February and 1 March 2024;
• UK statements distributed week commencing 26 February 2024; and
• UK payments between 18 – 29 March 2024.

Update 20 February 2024

The Freelance is informed that you can register new works for PLR by emailing plrauthorservices@bl.uk to ask for an Additional Book Registration Form. You can leave your PLR account number blank, since you cannot look it up online.

According to this temporary information page the deadline to register for next year's distribution is 30 June and the BL is "working hard to reinstate access before the end of the PLR year on 30 June".

Update 28 February 2024

Statements for UK PLR are published. Payment is expected soon.