The Shocking Fall of a 197-Year-Old Giant: What Really Happened to Baker & Taylor, the Library’s Lifeline?
The failure of Baker & Taylor comes after a planned merger with ReaderLink fell through. While the details aren’t available, we can only surmise that Baker & Taylor was having severe financial difficulties, and that ReaderLink didn’t think buying the company was worth the financial risk.
At BookLocker, we approached Baker & Taylor several years ago to try to get a better deal than we were getting from Ingram. Despite having thousands of books on the market, Baker & Taylor said we were “too small.” Gosh, maybe if they’d not refused to do business with some print on demand publishers, perhaps that could have saved them. They’d have made money on every book sold. Just looking at our numbers alone, I can tell you they walked away from a lot of revenue over the years. Not too smart!!
Post Comment