100-book challenge<\/a> for Children’s Book Week. Did anyone succeed? Did anyone almost succeed, and if so, do you need a few extra days to finish? Entries are still being accepted at e bluemle @ publishers weekly (no spaces, and the usual .com).
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\nThe bookselling community has been rattled this week\u00a0by the news that Baker & Taylor, one of the nation’s two largest book wholesalers, has decided to stop selling to\u00a0retailers and concentrate all of its efforts on the school and library market. The reverberations of this decision might not be immediately visible to the outside observer, but this is the latest body blow\u00a0to the\u00a0almost comically Sisyphean task of\u00a0running a\u00a0bricks-and-mortar bookstore.
\n
\nWholesalers stock hundreds of thousands of titles, making it possible for booksellers to\u00a0order books\u00a0from\u00a0multiple\u00a0publishers at once and receive them, in most cases, the following day. Wholesalers\u00a0ship faster than publishers, making it possible for bookstores to give their customers this overnight service for special orders. And because booksellers can build orders that meet free freight minimums with wholesalers, we can buy books from many small publishing houses at once and avoid margin-killing shipping charges.
\nTo put this in perspective for the layperson, Baker & Taylor and Ingram are major suppliers not only\u00a0to bricks-and-mortar\u00a0bookstores, but to Amazon. (Contrary to the\u00a0misunderstanding of many people outside the industry, Amazon doesn’t supply\u00a0booksellers with books. They are just another bookseller, ordering from all the same sources we do, so it’s ironic that Amazon is one of the reasons Baker & Taylor is getting out of the retail supply market.)
\nIt’s a BIG change to lose one of these behemoths, not only because it narrows the supply chain, but because it leaves bookstores vulnerable to\u00a0the potential ramifications of what becomes essentially a monopoly.\u00a0Last year, there was an uproar when the two wholesalers were pursuing a merger, because of these monopoly concerns.
\nEach wholesaler has its unique strengths, as well, and for our store, losing Baker & Taylor also means losing their better discount, which in a business where every percentage point has impact, is significant. It also means losing Baker\u2019s greater depth of the kinds of titles schools and libraries order from us, and their better discounts not only on regular titles, but on short-discounted books as well. (Often, Baker offered 20% off books that were sold at no discount on Ingram.)
\nThe news of this loss wasn’t a complete surprise, although it was announced\u00a0suddenly and with a very short adjustment period time (around six weeks until everything B&T-related stops for retailers).\u00a0Ingram has assured us that they are committed to the indie bookstore market, and their stock is the largest of any wholesaler, so we are hoping that the increased order volume\u00a0they receive will\u00a0support better, rather than worse, terms for booksellers. It’s a tough market all around, and I don’t know exactly how this decision will affect Ingram and all of the publishers who wholesale through Baker.
\nThe one bright spot in this mess is that a third wholesaler (the only other one\u00a0left in the country), Bookazine, which has a smaller footprint in the U.S. but\u00a0is primary in the overseas market, is\u00a0stepping up to help fill some of the gaps. They are actively soliciting feedback from booksellers to discover the areas in which we will most feel this change and are looking at ways to support indies, including those smaller, rural bookstores who rely almost entirely on Baker & Taylor for their books.
\nIt says something about the changing nature of the bookselling economy that we now have so few wholesaler choices. The advent of Amazon has seismically altered the landscape of\u00a0industries of every kind, funneling everything into a narrower and narrower channel \u2014 all attempting to lead to the same place.
\nIndependent bookstores are flexible, nimble, resilient\u2014all necessities\u2014and fabulous, but if people want us to be here, and want publishing to\u00a0be a vibrant and free enterprise, and if true choice matters to them, then these canaries in the coal mine (like B&T\u00a0shuttering its retail operations, like publishers merging and consolidating in the face of severe economic pressure, like bricks-and-mortar stores of all kinds\u00a0going out of business in every community) are the signs that we need to do some serious assessment of where we choose to send and spend our dollars. Every single choice matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bookstores are feeling the fallout from the loss of a major wholesaler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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