Guest guest Posted January 10, 2007 Report Share Posted January 10, 2007 from Amazon.com, about my poor lil company Amazon.com Bookstore's Amazon Blog Monday, January 8, 2007 Big Book Bankruptcy Hits the Little Guys 4:12 PM, January 8, 2007 We usually don't focus much on inside-baseball publishing news here, but the biggest story in publishing right now is the bankruptcy of Advanced Marketing Services, a large book distributor and, perhaps most importantly, the parent company of Publishers Group West, the biggest and most vibrant distributor of independent publishers in the U.S. AMS may well survive the bankruptcy, as will their largest creditors, but the ones being squeezed in this apparently voluntary strategy are the small and medium-sized publishers distributed by PGW. Corporate bankruptcy law is intricate, cruel, and tedious, but the upshot is that the PGW publishers, always skating on the thinnest of margins anyway, are threatened with losing revenues from the biggest quarter of the year. Among the hundreds of publishers affected are some of the most exciting and adventurous ones out there, including Grove Atlantic, Soft Skull, McSweeney's, Carroll & Graf, Sasquatch, Thunder's Mouth, and some of my favorite Canadian publishers, Douglas & McIntyre, House of Anansi, and Key Porter. If you want to read more, GalleyCat and EdRants are covering the story. And then there are the anonymous and bitterly funny emanations coming from the inside, on Radio Free PGW. This would of course be the perfect time to show your support by buying some books from PGW publishers, and you don't even have to do it through us. --Tom, Amazon Bookstore What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so. - Mark Twain Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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