News about B&T Distribution...

If you have a trade publishing deal (which one assumes will be part of the agent route) the impact will probably be very small. But the risk is in the indie presses and self publishers, it looks like. It makes the in-roads to print harder.

Also trying to wrap my head around it, troubling for a few reasons.

Has anyone heard what Ingram's current position on this is?

Yeah, I'm reminded of what happened with comic book distribution folded.

This is complicated. It's going to have an effect, and possibly side effects with respect to increasing, maybe (?) ebook sales. I dunno.

badducky said:

I feel like the trade publishing route will be impacted, if not right away, soon. Monopolies do things.

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Exactly. Everyone will be impacted some type of way. Whenever a company with such an influence closes it's felt by everyone in the industry. From what I've heard from independent booksellers (meaning people who run small bookstores) this could kill them. Definitely don't agree with having just one distributor as well.

Yeah, I was one of the ones who didn't survive the Great Comic Book Distributor Wars. You really, REALLY, don't want only one way to get books onto the market.

Can't find the article now, but I also read that e-reader sales are WAY down across the board. Maybe it's because people are using the apps on their tablets/phones/computers, but it's still an interesting factoid to come out almost the same time as this news.

Richard White said:

Yeah, I was one of the ones who didn't survive the Great Comic Book Distributor Wars. You really, REALLY, don't want only one way to get books onto the market.

Can't find the article now, but I also read that e-reader sales are WAY down across the board. Maybe it's because people are using the apps on their tablets/phones/computers, but it's still an interesting factoid to come out almost the same time as this news.

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Could be that mostly everyone who wants an e-reader has one by now, and unlike say phones or laptops or computers they don't really need to be upgraded to a newer model practically every other year. That'd reduce the market to just people who have/had an e-reader but need to replace it (whether because it's broken, was lost, was stolen, etc.) and people who didn't need/want one before but do now (e.g. kids growing up to an age where having their own e-reader makes actual sense because they're capable of reading by themselves)

That makes perfect sense. I know it's not related to the B&T announcement, but I just found it interesting that the news came out the same week as the first.

There's also the fact that the newer e-readers are not as well liked by some as the original models. Amazon has purposefully taken away popular features like audio, headphone jacks, buttons to click to the next page rather than swiping which can turn too many pages at once, the ability to organize your library into collections, and the newer version of their text-to-speech screen reader is far worse than the original one--it pauses for several seconds mid-sentence and clicks every time you reach the end of a page.

Looking at this as a self-publisher, I'd say that the trade system is likely to be the hardest hit by having a distributor fold. SP authors can use KDP print. We still have at least one choice--KDP and/or Ingram--although it's never a good thing to have your options narrow like this.

CathleenT said:

Looking at this as a self-publisher, I'd say that the trade system is likely to be the hardest hit by having a distributor fold. SP authors can use KDP print. We still have at least one choice--KDP and/or Ingram--although it's never a good thing to have your options narrow like this.

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Another distributor for indies will be Draft 2 Digital's print option. I was on the waiting list and it's in beta now. I haven't tried it yet but have heard from others who have. They have some kinks to iron out but I am satisfied that they will. D2D takes author satisfaction seriously and is always improving their service. Hopefully this becomes another big player for indies concerning print. Not too many are happy with KDP Print right now. Createspace was better.

Also I am a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors and members get discounts for Ingram which is good for those looking to cut print costs. I've never tried Ingram though.

Ooooh, I can't wait to see the D2D print version. You are sooo right about CreateSpace being a better service than KDP print.

Losing B&T is potentially going to hurt indy comic publishers also. They'd been using B&T to get graphic novels into book stores instead of using Diamond Distributing.