Of acquisitions and interference: accounting for systemic threats to the freedom to read
| Date | 23 August 2023 |
| Pages | 277-297 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2023-0089 |
| Published date | 23 August 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | E.E. Lawrence |
Of acquisitions and interference:
accounting for systemic threats
to the freedom to read
E.E. Lawrence
Department of Library and Information Science,
School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Librarianship’s dominant conception of the freedom to read is governed by a liberal principle of
noninterference, wherein free readers are those who face no intentional intervention in their choice of materials.
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how this account fails to adequately capture systemic threats that
impoverish people’s reading lives.
Design/methodology/approach –This conceptual paper deploys informal argumentation to expose a flaw
in the dominant account of the freedom to read. The author uses a case study of comparativetitles or comps, an
editorial decision-making and justificatory convention that reproduces racial inequality in Anglophone trade
publishing.
Findings –Comps present one example of how everyday norms and practices of literary production render
people’s reading lives pervasivelyunfree, even absent some intent tointerfere in them. The going account of the
freedom to read calls, at best, for a greater diversity of book-commodities from which consumers may choose.
However, the comp case suggests that this distributive remedy will be insufficient without relevant changes to
the institutional arrangements that condition readers’choices in the first place.
Originality/value –This paper draws together insights from Library and Information Science, political
philosophy and print culture studies to illuminate limitations in librarianship’s standard conception of the
freedom to read. This reveals the need for an alternative, structural account of that freedom with significant
implications for practice.
Keywords Intellectual freedom, Information access, Publishing studies, Social justice
Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
Imagine a reader. They stand before a well-stocked bookshelf in their local library, at liberty
to select from among the available options those that best accord with their own tastes and
objectives. The books that line this shelf are varied (including, as the old adage goes,
“something to offend everyone”), while nearby signage is limited to “viewpoint-neutral
directional aids”and organizational labels that help the patron navigate their potential
selections without exerting any nontrivial influence over readers’decision-making (ALA,
2015). Meanwhile, the benevolent librarian stands by, ready to assist at the patron’s behest as
an impartial information intermediary or aesthetically-agnostic “matchmaker”(see
Lawrence, 2020,2017). In the latter case, the librarian will suggest recreational materials
consistent with the reader’s existing preferences, which they bring with them into the library
like precious and “private possessions ...free from external control or interference”(Miller,
2006, p. 67). In this way, whatever books the reader ultimately selects or does not, however
they use or interpret or feel about them, the choice itself will have been their own.
On the library profession’s prevailing account, this is the archetypal free reader: free
because their choices are free. To put it another way, the freedom to read is governed by a
liberal principle of noninterference, wherein free readers are those who face no intentional
intervention in their selection of materials. Securing this freedom therefore necessitates that
individual readers be left as much as possible to their own devices, positioned such that they
The freedom to
read
277
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 10 May 2023
Revised 28 July 2023
Accepted 30 July 2023
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 80 No. 2, 2024
pp. 277-297
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-05-2023-0089
may ignore the aesthetic, moral and political standards of others (ALA, 1953/2004). Practical
implications follow for librarians, who are called on to resist the outside imposition of such
standards, to refrain from imposing their own on patrons, and to provide noninvasive
infrastructural support and maximally-wide-ranging access to resources such that the patron
may pursue their own ends. Libraries, on this view, serve both as zones of protected decision-
making and neutral providers of print and digital materials that make free reading choices,
and thus the freedom to read, possible.
In this paper, I wish to raise a concern that troubles precisely the above picture of
readers’freedom. For though the d ominant noninterfe rence account underpi ns some
appropriate objections to overt censorship, it also narrows the scope of normative
consideration to paternalistic and elitist interventions in the individual’s selection of
reading materials. As a result, I argue that librarianship’s (mainly negative) conception of
the freedom to read fail s to adequately capture s ystemic threats that li mit and distort the
possible choices collectively available to readers. This essay explicates this flaw in the
mainstream account through a case study of comparative titles or comps, an acquisitions
convention that rep roduces racial inequality in A nglophone trade publishing ( see McGrath,
2019,2021;Saha, 2016). Comps demonstrate one way in which the underlying norms and
everyday practices of literary production render our reading lives pervasively unfree, even
absent some intent to interfere in them. That unfreedom extends beyond the material
availability of texts, from what we choose to read to how we choose to read it—or even, for
that matter, to what we ca n imagine reading. Give n this, the comp case sugg ests that
standard distribut ive remedies advocate d among librarians (an d others) will prove
insufficient witho ut changes to the inst itutional arrangem ents that condition r eaders’
choices in the first place. It follows that a more successful account of the freedom to read will
be a structural one.
2. Racial inequality in publishing and the noninterference response
This paper begins from the premise that the Anglophone book industry is a site of systemic
racial inequality. Though a comprehensive exploration of that inequality falls outside the
scope of the present project, it is worth noting that recent computational and data-driven
research has been particularly valuable in illuminating its depth and historical breadth at
scale (see, e.g. Grossman et al., 2021;Le-Khac and Hao, 2021;McGrath, 2019;Ramdarshan
Bold, 2021;Sinykin and Roland, 2021). So (2021), for instance, demonstrates the severity and
relative resilience of racial disparities in 20th and 21st century trade publishing in the United
States. For example, in a sample of 7,124 fiction book published by major houses between
1950 and 2018, So and his collaborator Gus Wezerek found that 95% were written by White
people, while in 2018 alone White authors accounted for 89% of such books (So and Wezerek,
2020). In a separate study, So (2021, p. 29) discovered that 97% of the novels Random House
published in the latter half of the 20th century were by White writers, while only 2% were by
Black ones. That this is the case for Random House—the Big Five publisher known among
“American literary historians ... as particularly progressive in terms of racial
representation”—underscores the degree to which standard narratives concerning a rising
tide of literary multiculturalism elide the reality (and gravity) of the situation (So, 2021, p. 29).
As a general rule, “representation for racial minorities within spaces dominated by White
people is”often perceived to be on the rise, but this “assumption around the nature of
progress is misguided”and obscures a trajectory marked more pervasively by sporadic
growth and regression (Dane, 2023, p. 6). Indeed, even a modest increase in the publication of
Black authors during Toni Morrison’s tenure as editor at Random House did not result in
durable, institutional changes, as the publisher quickly returned to its pre-Morrison levels of
Black authorship following her departure (So, 2021, p. 66) [1].
JD
80,2
278
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