Books are going to take longer to get to libraries

The Comics Journal – What Baker & Taylor’s demise means for comics: “…I got on the phone with Britten Follett to talk about B&T, the library distribution market, and what these changes mean for the industry. A fifth-generation family member, Britten Follett is CEO at Follett Content, which is the largest provider of children’s and young adult print materials and solutions to PreK-12 libraries, classrooms, learning centers, and school districts in the United States. It’s a major supplier to educational institutions worldwide, and now a provider to public libraries. She has led Follett’s PreK-12 business since September 2019 and is responsible for providing leadership, strategic direction, and business development. She gave me a picture of the centrality of B&T’s place in library distribution. “Baker & Taylor was the largest provider of materials to public libraries and has been for many, many, many, many years. Our most recent survey data indicated that they still served as much as 50% of the market, and that leaves hundreds of millions of dollars in book orders hanging in the balance. There’s no question this is a crisis for the public library market. There isn’t a distributor today who is equipped to take on all of that volume and ensure that the books are cataloged, processed, and distributed in the way that Baker & Taylor provided services to public libraries. There are way more orders and not enough capacity within the existing businesses that serve the market. ” Shauntee Burns-Simpson, President of the ALA Graphic Novels & Comics Round Table, also recognizes B&T’s place at the center of the library distribution market. She told me, “Baker & Taylor has been such an integral partner for libraries, especially in helping us build strong, diverse graphic novel collections that reflect the readers we serve. Their closure feels like the end of an era. For many of us in libraries, it raises real concerns about access and equity in the comics market. We’ll need to work even harder to ensure readers can still discover the power of comics.” Tucker Stone agreed. “B&T had a smart, resourceful staff, all of whom are now out of a job. They had warehouses that served various regions; now those books will have less places to be shipped from, and less people to ship them,” he said. “The private equity company that was involved will take the lion’s share of whatever money is left into their universe of bullshit, which is not books, not art, not reading, not literature. It won’t go to authors, it won’t go to publishers. It’s our blood, and it was stolen. Librarians who haven’t already had to take the time to move all their sourcing over to the other competitors will now have to do that quickly, and there aren’t going to be hours added in the day to make that convenient, or easy, and it will just be another way to make life harder for libraries.” Fantagraphics isn’t the only publisher seeing the fallout from this change…”