Baker and Taylor Going Out of Business…

No Real Surprise…

B&T at one point in time was the main distributor to bookstores. Maybe the largest book distributor at times. It was founded in the 1800s, actually.

Over the last fifty years it morphed into different forms and with different corporate owners too stupid to detail out here. And parts of the company were sold off. (Always a good plan.)

When indie publishing with Amazon fired up, “extended distribution” went to B&T and for a time all indie books had a special code that basically kept bookstores from buying indie books.

Can I say “shortsighted on B&T’s part. But at that point their main customers were the big traditional presses, so pretty sure where that mandated from. (We started up Ella Distribution to go around that blocking code, and then one day they lifted it and killed Ella.)

Ingrams, with purchasing POD companies and merging them into Ingram Sparks, took over as the major book distributor and they cater to the indie publishers in a ton of ways (although I wish they would hurry up and connect to Shopify stores.)

B&T morphed into a library focus ed distribution to try to say alive, but it had a lot of competition that did it better these days.

B&T was basically another old traditional-focused feature that this new world killed off. It will hurt traditional publishers with large accounts payable with B&T, but I have not yet heard of any indie press getting hurt at all. Not how we indie publishers do business in this new world.

So B&T shutting down is no surprise. They just couldn’t keep up the shell game of old methods, huge warehouses, and selling themselves to the lowest bidder in mergers.

Another traditional dinosaur bites the dust. No one really cares.