Why libraries may not be an unalloyed good

I was brought up in a small town in northern England, in a poor working-class family surrounded by other poor working-class families. Ours was not a literary household - indeed, it was barely literate - there were no books lying around to be idly picked up and consumed. There was no bookshop in the town, but there was a library, and this library gave my young curious self access to the accumulated knowledge and literature of the entire world, and I made full use of it.
So, I have always been grateful for, and supportive of, libraries. I still use them now, occasionally, in my comfortable 60s (Toronto Public Library, of which I am a member, is the largest neighbourhood-based library system in the world, with a higher circulation per capita and more visitors than any other library system in North America). I have therefore never questioned whether libraries might be anything other than an unalloyed public good. But there is another viewpoint to consider, that of book publishers and authors, and, from that viewpoint, libraries do not look quite so munificent.
Libraries provide a sorts of services nowadays, from free internet access to public education courses to help for immigrants to research facilities and databases to providing oases of comfort during heat waves and cold spells. But the main thing they still do is lend out books, in various formats, for free, which is a great boon for those who can not otherwise afford them. But many, if not most, of library users are actually middle-class and well-educated, people who probably can afford to buy books, which puts libraries in direct competition with book stores, both the large online facilities like Amazon and the (rapidly disappearing) small independent bookstores.
Libraries too have to buy the books they lend from publishers and authors. But each library book is lent out about eight times a year on average (and usually over multiple years) which, from one point of view is at least seven lost potential book sales. In practice, it is less than that, because some library borrows are not necessarily replacing book sales, but either way, the existence of libraries results in fewer book sales than might otherwise have been the case.
If you were in any doubt that libraries are in direct competition with bookstores, think about Toronto Public Library's clever but poignant advertising campaign for last year's Black Friday: "Black Friday Special: 100% off all books! Print! Digital! Audio! Don't miss the deals every day at the TPL!" Or think of the Wichita, Kansas libraries' checkout receipts that boldly state, "You just saved $164.80 by using your library", or the Massachussetts Library Association's "Library Value Calculator" that lets you calculate how much you have saved by not having to buy the books you borrow. In fact, a rough calculation suggests that Americans and Canadians "save" more by using libraries than all book publishers combined make in a year.
All told, roughly four books are borrowed from North American libraries for every book sold through a book store. Clearly, if bookstores are not selling books, authors are not making any money either: the US Authors' Guild estimates that American authors make on average (median) about US$6,080 a year, down from US$10,500 in 2009, and only about half of that comes from actual book sales as opposed to appearance money, sponsorship, etc. In Canada, the avarage author makes about C$9,380, down 78% since 1998. The average librarian makes five to eight times what an author makes.
So, yes, libraries are wonderful places, but in an age where K-12 educstion is compulsory, where schools have their own libraries, and where the classics are available online for free anyway, libraries are no longer what early public library funder Andrew Carnegie called "palaces for the people", a bulwark against illiteracy. And make no mistake, the vast majority of library lendings are not for education ir edification, but for relaxation, entertainment and enjoyment (that why libraries stock many more copies of Fifty Shades of Grey than of Plato's Republic).
So, there you go. As this article (on which most of this blog entry is based) concludes, "For their funding, libraries rely on traffic generated by pimping free entertainment to people who can afford it. All the genuine good they do is to some extent made possible by being a net harm to literature". Food for thought.