Of acquisitions and interference: accounting for systemic threats to the freedom to read

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.

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 comparative titles or comps, an editorial decision-making and justificatory convention that reproduces racial inequality in Anglophone trade publishing.

Comps present one example of how everyday norms and practices of literary production render people’s reading lives pervasively unfree, even absent some intent to interfere 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.

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.