The real issue emerges here: The words “license ebooks” are the most important ones in the whole lawsuit.
Publishers approve of libraries paying for e-book licenses because they’re temporary, just like your right to watch a movie on Netflix is temporary and can evaporate at any moment. In the same way, publishers would like to see libraries obliged to license, not to own, books—that is, continue to pay for the same book again and again. That’s what this lawsuit is really about. It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that publishers took advantage of the pandemic to achieve what they had not been able to achieve previously: to turn the library system into a “reading as a service” operation from which they can squeeze profits forever.
At the start of lockdown in March, with months of home-time stretching ahead of us, I decided to try to interest my son in Spider-Man. Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, if we liked and admired the same superhero? Wouldn’t it make me a more useful and three-dimensional dad? Like many parents, grandparents, godparents, carers, aunts, uncles, older cousins and other interested parties before me, I was about to embark on the desperately sensitive work of passing on an allegiance to a child. If you’re a family of football devotees, the indoctrination has to begin young, against the terrible possibility of a child from (say) a Sheffield Wednesday or a Charlton Athletic household coming home one day with admiring words for Liverpool or Chelsea. This is how lifelong family schisms begin.
The pandemic has a way of constantly reminding us that our lives are deeply intertwined. But it also shrinks our daily existences into small, isolating little worlds. Every day presents a new way to feel helpless, a new wrinkle of loneliness. We can’t counter the current risks of the outside world on our own. But we can find agency, even comfort, in their smallness. We can mow our backyards, or even just tend the flowers in our windowsill, and ready them for a time when we can share them — and ourselves — again.
Spending time with her, I’m reminded that so much of what we consider a happy, successful life is largely made up in our own minds, and often the product of ego and lack of fulfillment in other ways. She wants an array of simple things, but they are joyful: walks in nature, naps in the afternoon, a delicious treat. It reminds me that humans need all those things, too, now more than ever.
This funny and plangent book is shot through with an aching awareness that though our individual existence is a “litany of small tragedies”, these tragedies are life-sized to us. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist working now who writes about both youth and middle age with such sympathy, and without condescending to either.
Both a borrower and a lender be--