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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2013
Philosophers write essays. Nowadays most of them are highly technical and argumentative. They have titles like ‘A Rejoinder to So and So’ or ‘A Critique of Such and Such’. This is somewhat understandable. Like others in my field, as a philosopher, my work is predicated on having interlocutors – all of whom, with a few exceptions, I have never met. This is the beauty of the written word combined with public libraries. Because of printing I can engage the ideas of others from a different time or place; because of libraries I am not excluded from the conversation because of social or economic class.
1 Recently (March 2012), 17 publishing companies filed an injunction which shut down a website called library.nu – the most efficient and well-stocked resource for stealable electronic books.
2 See §107–108 of the United States Copyright Act, which holds that ‘it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work.’ Since it is not a violation of copyright there are no royalties involved with photocopying a book that a library holds.
