I should be more upset about the sudden shuttering of Small Press Distribution than I am. We knew that they were on shaky ground. They went through a weird reorganization of their processes last year. It didn’t sound like a sustainable, coherent plan, and I guess it wasn’t because they failed fast and closed abruptly. The wholesale and distribution sides of the book business are brutal. SPD isn’t the only firm that’s failed lately. It likely won’t be the last.
Our store didn’t order from SPD often: four, five, six times each year, mostly for campus author visits and/or for course adoptions. SPD handled lots of interesting, quirky, titles that we enjoyed stocking and selling, books that you don’t see every day in more mainstream outlets — for us, mostly poetry and literary fiction, though they repped books across other categories too. As the distributor for hundreds of small imprints, SPD made it easier for us to bring these books into our store, and we’re likely going to have to work harder to source these titles in the future. It’s going to be hard to find the extra time to find publishers, figure out terms, place orders, receive more small shipments, set up vendors for payment, send checks, etc. Not to mention paying more ship charges on those individual small orders than we would have with the consolidation SPD offered.
As hard as we’ll have to work, the publishers involved have it much worse, They need to extricate their books from the warehouses SPD outsourced them to, an unexpected expense that may hit hard. They’ll lose revenue and cashflow, and they will need to figure out how to reconnect with stores that bought from SPD. In The New York Times, legendary City Lights buyer Paul Yamazaki said “we will not have relationships with all 300 presses that were represented by SPD.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/books/small-press-distribution-closure.html) It’s impossible for stores and it’s impossible for publishers too. Book distributors and wholesalers are the necessary glue that holds the business together, essential cogs in the machinery that moves books from publishers to readers. We don’t spend enough time appreciating what they do for us.
Still, our store had an issue with SPD, a significant one that made it hard to feel good about working with them, however much we appreciated the books. When we ordered, SPD asked if the books were for trade or text. Trade includes our regular retail book shelves and author events. Texts are books that faculty asked us to stock for classes they are teaching; our text department is open shelving, so these books are also browsed and shopped by all readers. It seems silly, but that distinction mattered to SPD, which discounted trade orders at 40%, while texts got only a 20% discount. (Most general trade books are wholesaled to stores on a suggested retail price minus discount basis, giving stores margin to cover our costs and, hopefully, make a little money.)
You’d think that the trade/text designation wouldn’t make a difference: the same store is ordering the same books on the same account number, the books are shipping from the same warehouse to the same store’s receiving address, and the invoice is paid all the same. So what gives? I don’t know. No one has offered a sensible explanation, and the only result is to drive up prices for college students who are trying to buy required course materials from their campus stores. If our store pays more for a book, then we have to charge more. (We discount a Penguin Classic adopted for a course because Penguin Random House offers generous terms of sale and is super easy to work with. We sell many smaller press titles at suggested retail because their terms aren’t as good, and they’re often much more difficult to deal with.)
The differential discount practice seems to be less prevalent today than when I first crossed over to the dark side in 2010 to source and sell books in campus bookstores. That SPD maintained the distinction to this day tells you something about them being stuck in the past, and the problem of adjusting terms of sale to meet today’s challenges. SPD couldn’t possibly have been asking Amazon about orders it placed, even though very likely some books SPD shipped there would be purchased by students for their classes. Because SPD sold to Amazon for less than it sold to my store, Amazon had opportunities to discount that I couldn’t possibly match. It’s weird that SPD that would side with the trillion dollar company over our small, independent campus store. But that’s the decision they made.
There are ways in which we’re constrained from talking about terms of sale, notably federal antitrust restrictions but also because there’s a cultural disinclination in the book business against appearing to be too concerned about money. We’re in this for the art, not the dollars, right? But as much as economists would have us believe that morality has no place in markets, terms of sale aren’t just numbers, they reflect values. We can recognize that the numbers matter and that we’re in a competitive business, but we can and should understand that the choices that companies make aren’t neutral. SPD should have been on our side and on the side of the students that we serve. But they didn’t act that way.