During the last four decades, the percentage of the American population having public library cards has increased almost three fold from about 25 to 72. On the contrary, in a progressive state like Karnataka, after 40 years of enacting a comprehensive Public Libraries Act and establishing 5,000 libraries, we have not been able to reach more than 2% of the population.

A poor market penetration of public libraries over half a century of the National Library Movement! A disgrace on the part of 98% of the public supposed to be enjoying the ‘right to read’ and who also contribute 6 ps. as library cess out of every rupee of tax paid. Rubbing salt into the wound, city corporations and town municipalities are not transferring crores of rupees collected as library cess and hence not fully spent for the purpose for which it is collected. Increasing library membership depends much on how far the educational system and literacy programmes turn out literates with a good reading habit.

One may even say that people need not have to use public libraries to read books as they could easily buy and read the required books. Yes, it is certainly possible. An interesting fact is that 95% of books sold in America are bought directly by individuals and the remaining 5% by libraries. A library member in America, on an average, borrows two books per year and astonishingly this borrowed use of books of American libraries is almost equal to 95% of books directly bought and read by individuals.

In contrast, in India, despite having the second largest literate population and large middle class literates almost equal to the US population, individual purchases of books account for less than 25% of total sales of books.

Buying power

It is generally believed that poor and middle class citizens neither have enough money to buy books nor are they willing to give priority for books while spending their meagre savings. But interestingly, to buy a book, a century ago, an average person had to spend wages worth 4 hours, but today the same requires the wages of just 20 minutes. During the twentieth century (in America), expenditure on entertainment has increased from 1.9 to 5.6% of income and buying reading material has decreased from 25.5 to 15.8% of entertainment expenditure. At the same time, the total leisure time has also substantially increased all over the world.

It is difficult to equate buying (or possessing or borrowing) books with reading of books. In this context of negligible public library membership and very few people buying books, it is also possible to argue that one can use libraries other than public libraries to borrow and read books. But a recent survey in one university revealed that not even 5% of the teachers take books from the university library!

It is very unfortunate that the publishing industry and public libraries in India still hesitate to identify themselves as part of leisure and service industries and do nothing to promote their products and services. They are immensely preoccupied in the game of bulk purchase of books. The scheme is running like a government ‘subsidy’ for publishers and authors of regional language books.

A majority of publishers and author cum publishers print 1000 copies of Kannada books to dump 600 to 800 copies to public libraries and the education department at once under the single window bulk purchase scheme without any marketing and distribution worth the name.

Hence no wonder that individual purchases of books are so low and Karnataka having over 10% of publishers in the country produce only 2.6% books. Yet, neither the public library department nor the book industry has bothered to create a comprehensive catalogue of (about 1 lakh) Kannada books published so far. A library with all Kannada books under one roof has remained a distant dream. Even today, one can instantly access from anywhere details of a large number of Kannada books (over 15,000) from online catalogues of US Library of Congress, British Library or ‘WorldCat’ of OCLC (US) on the net and not from web sites of any local library including the national library.

Amusingly, it was claimed recently by a minister that the public libraries in Karnataka are better used than those in other States. It could be true that the plight of public libraries elsewhere in the country is worse than that in Karnataka. The above statement is supposed to have been based on the statistics that 3,100 readers (out of 15,570 members) visit one of the 17 public libraries in the central region of Bangalore and borrow 600 books per day from a collection of 3 lakh books. Probably, it would have been more appropriate to compare the above figures with that of a small/ compact British library located in the same part of Bangalore with just 22,000 books, 7,500 paid members and less than a dozen staff. Interestingly, this single British library records visit of 600 members and issue of 1,000 books a day!

In conclusion

In a nutshell, our education system and literacy programmes do not effectively take nascent literates to the reading habit, the publishing industry is indifferent about marketing books to individuals and public libraries appear to be more interested in expensive digitisation and Braille book projects than reaching out to the public at large.

While some optimistically believe that the reading habit has not declined, even if it has not increased, the others fascinated by digital libraries and the Internet go to the extent of predicting the end of printed books and libraries, as if there was a high readership in the pre-internet era. Hopefully, a periodic national survey of reading habits as part of the National Sample Survey recommended by the National Knowledge Commission, if completed, may help us to have a better picture.