Distribution and wholesaling in this industry is a mess. A lot of these firms - SPD included - were living in the 20th century when it came to all areas of oper

Distribution and wholesaling in this industry is a mess. A lot of these firms - SPD included - were living in the 20th century when it came to all areas of operations. I'm not surprised to hear the news that they are consolidating further. Even before SPD went out of business, it was very difficult to get "traditional distribution" that enables sales in bookstores. Indie publishers often forego distribution (and by extension, bookstore sales) and go it alone with their own websites, direct sales to individual retailers, and print on demand through Ingram and Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. I recommend the following article for insights into challenges faced by SPD: The Berkeley publishing mindset of the 1970s was singular and beautiful in many ways. These people did not set out to be celebrities or to make names for themselves per se, or even to strike it rich. The orientation to publishing was around books for their cultural merit and value, and if they reached more readers than expected, wonderful. The ecosystem supported itself because everyone supported each other. If there were halcyon days in book publishing, this was it (not accounting for the truly problematic and systemic -isms that have since become so widely unveiled and understood). The afterglow lasted a good many years because I caught its tail end in the early 2000s when I started at North Atlantic Books. By then, these guys were in their 60s, starting to wind down, and many of them wouldn’t be around to tackle the tsunami of change that was on the horizon. https://brookewarner.substack.com/p/distribution-the-most-misunderstood https://brookewarner.substack.com/p/distribution-the-most-mi...