Libraries Scramble for Books After Giant Distributor Shuts Down

Hey there,

Today we have another story from Claire Woodcock, who you'll be seeing more on the site thanks in part to a grant we got from the MuckRock foundation to do a lot of reporting on libraries. Today's story is about what happened when one of the biggest book distributors for public libraries in the country shut down with little warning.

-Emanuel

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.

One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend books. 

“You might notice some delays as we (and more than 6,000 other libraries) transition to new wholesalers,” the Jacksonville Public Library told its community in a Facebook post. “We're keeping a close eye on things and doing everything we can to minimize any wait times.”

The libraries that do business with the distributor learned about the shut down earlier this month via Reddit.

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Upon learning of her company’s closure, Jennifer Kennedy, a customer services account manager with Baker & Taylor, broke the news on October 6 on r/Libraries Reddit community. 

“I just wanted the libraries to know,” Kennedy told 404 Media. “I didn’t want them to be held hostage waiting for books that would never come. I respect them too much for all this nonsense.”

Kennedy’s post prompted other current and former B&T employees to confirm the announcement and express concern for the competitors about to be inundated with requests from the libraries who would be scrambling for new suppliers. 

B&T in Memoriam

Baker & Taylor has been in the book business just short of 200 years. Its primary focus was distributing physical copies of books to public libraries. The company also provided librarians with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively related to collection development and processing. 

But the company has spent decades being acquired by and divested from private equity firms, served as a revolving door for senior leadership, and was sued by a competitor earlier this year for alleged data misuse and was almost acquired again in September, this time by a distributor that works with mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target. That deal fell through. 

On October 7, Publishers Weekly reported B&T let go of more than 500 employees the day the internal announcement was made. At least one law firm is currently investigating B&T for allegedly violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and it took the company weeks to let account holders know. 

Since the internal announcement, Kennedy says customer service staff at B&T have not received guidance on how to respond to inquiries from libraries, leaving them on the frontline and in the dark on issues ranging from whether existing orders would be fulfilled to securing refunds for materials they may have already paid for.  

“Some libraries didn’t realize we are much closed as of right now,” Kennedy added.

B&T did not respond when asked for comment. 

Kennedy has been with B&T for 16 years. At a time when it's uncommon to remain with one company more than a few years, that’s exactly what many of B&T’s employees have been able to do, until now. The same was true of the libraries who did business with them. Andrew Harant, director of Cuyahoga Falls Library had to consider the library's longstanding business relationship with the company against the roughly 20 percent of books the library had ordered from the beginning of the year they had never received.

“For us, that was about 1,500 items,” which Harant told 404 Media that for a small library is a lot of books they were ordering and not receiving. 

Release dates for new books come and go on B&T’s main software platform for viewing and managing orders, Title Source 360. Better known as TS360, Harant realized the platform was updating preordered books never received to on backorder, which was “not sustainable”.

In September, Cuyahoga Falls Library canceled all outstanding orders with B&T. 

“We needed to step up and make sure that we’re getting the books for our patrons that they needed,” he said. 

Cuyahoga Falls Library was fortunate to have an existing account with the other main distributor on the scene, Ingram Content Group. This has been true for many of the libraries 404 Media reached out to for this story.

“The easier part is re-ordering the book,” Shellie Cocking, Chief of Collections and Technical Services for the San Francisco Public Library, told 404 Media. “The harder part is replacing the tools you use to order books.”

Integrated Fallout

Of the ancillary services B&T offered customers, TS360 was Cocking’s favorite. It helped her  streamline collection development tasks, for instance, anticipating how popular a title might be or determining how many quantities of a book to purchase, which for larger libraries with dozens of branches, could be complicated to figure out manually. Once titles were ordered in TS360, B&T shared a Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) record that was automatically shared with the library’s API integration using data derived from B&T’s record set. This product, BTCat, was the subject of a lawsuit brought by OCLC earlier this year. 

OCLC owns WorldCat, the global union catalog of library collections that lets anyone see what libraries own what items. OCLC alleged in a U.S. district court filing that B&T misused their proprietary bibliographic records to populate its own competing cataloguing database. OCLC also accused B&T of inserted clauses into its contracts where there was overlap with the businesses and customers, requiring libraries to grant B&T access to their cataloging records so the libraries could then license the records back to B&T for BTCat. B&T has denied these claims, accusing OCLC of stifling fair competition in an already consolidated marketplace.

Marshall Breeding, an independent consultant who monitors library vendor mergers has been following all of this rather closely. He says B&T's closure creates a number of bottlenecks for libraries, the primary one being whether suppliers like Ingram or Brodart can absorb thousands of libraries as customers all at once. 

“Maybe, maybe not,” Breeding told 404 Media. “It’s going to take them a while to set up the business relationships and technical things that have to be set up for libraries to automatically order books from the providers.”

But one thing is evident. 

“Libraries are kind of in a weaker position just scrambling to find a vendor at all,” he added. 

Less competition in the market makes for more challenging working conditions all around. Just ask Erin Hughes, director of the Wood Ridge Memorial Library in New Jersey, made the move over to Ingram after a series of negative experiences with B&T in 2021 from late and damaged deliveries to customer service calls that went poorly, to say the least. Hughes worries her experience with B&T will happen again, only this time with Ingram. 

Since the Reddit announcement, she's noticed it's a little more difficult to get a rep on the phone and the number of shipments to the library is smaller. But the other way Hughes is seeing the problem play out involves the consortium her library belongs to. While she may have foregone B&T years ago, her network hasn't, which affects the operability of InterLibrary Loan lending.

“The resource sharing is going to be off for a bit,” Hughes told 404 Media. 

Amazon Incoming

If Ingram’s service stagnates due to the B&T cluster, Hughes says she'll use Amazon, which recently launched its own online library hub, offering competitive pricing. One downside, says Hughes, is that it's Amazon. 

“No, we do have a little bit of pause around Amazon,” she added. “But we’re at a point now where Ingram actually does supply most of the books for Amazon. So we’re already in the devil’s pocket. It’s all connected. It’s all integrated. And as much as I personally don’t care for the whole thing, I don’t really see a lot of other options.” 

It's hard not to think this outcome was predictable and also preventable. We know what happens when private equity gets involved with businesses not expected to generate high growth or returns, as well as what happens when there's too little market competition in any given sector. It can't be a cautionary tale because market consolidation is in itself a cautionary tale. 

But it’s also worth acknowledging how the timing could not be worse. Library use is way up right now, which is indicative of the times. People are buying less for various reasons. People also seem to like the idea of putting a little friction between their media consumption habits and Big Brother, even at the expense of a little convenience.

“We kind of made our own bed a little bit because we didn’t branch out,” said Hughes. “We didn’t find other solutions to this, and we were relying essentially on two giant companies, one of which folded so quick it was not even funny.”