The Collapse of Small Press Distribution | Hacker News Reader

The Collapse of Small Press Distribution

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130 pointsPaul-Craft26 comments

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-mi...

this is true, and it goes back further.. to small press freedoms in North America and in Europe ..

Is this only for mass market trade books?

There are dozens of university presses in North America alone that have a huge selection of high quality books available for order at any time, from what I can see online.

And there are multiple small distributors for the rest of the world that seemed to be viable businesses.

For example, I bought an excellent textbook published by Kyoto university on morphology of modern agricultural products written by Japan's leading expert in this field, including relevant research notes from his best students, all bound in an excellent hardcover English translation.

OT, but I really have to ask: "what does morphology of modern agricultural products mean?".

Thanks to whoever can explain this in layman terms.

Their external and internal structure, shape, colour, density, etc….

While I was in undergrad, I volunteered at SPD’s warehouse in Berkeley for a summer. Although I enjoyed my time there, and I learned a lot about non-profits, publishing and more, I found it be a very strange, tense, and awkward place to work. And cliquey. I did not feel welcome, seen or accepted. Kind of like the Bay Area at large over the past decade or more (and I speak as a regional native).

An anonymous former employee supports the claim that SPD was a poor place to work, run by toxic people: https://damagedbookworker.medium.com/terrorized-by-spd-61201...

While I feel for this person, this gets very messy when people passionate about the industry agree to "unpaid internships". Yes it's not right and they should stop, but it's literally a little like letting someone screw you with no commitment, then you being upset they don't feel the same way as you do.

I know the arts are rife with this stuff, but stay away from it.

> (...) it's literally a little like letting someone screw you with no commitment, then you being upset they don't feel the same way as you do.

I strongly disagree with this take. Contributing your time to a non-profit is not "letting someone screw you with no commitment". Moreso if you're an intern in a non-profit that explicitly set forth to offer unpaid internships to anyone who applied. Volunteers are there to contribute without expecting a salary, but that is not consent for abuse. Quite the opposite.

Also, you're talking about completely distinct things. Volunteering for an organization is not a green card to be treated poorly or abused by current staff. In fact, organizations who open internships understand well how it is in their best interests to create a good environment and a good experience. They know they are opening their inner workings to the outside world and creating experiences for those whose main deliverable for the organization is not work but PR in the form of testimonies and first-hand accounts.

An anecdotal examination of a low-volume book written of someone I used to know. You can guess what also happened to their printer. [0] Dead tree carcasses with alternating dark and light patterns are quietly evaporating the way of piano tuners and cassette tapes. All "progress" is not progress, but it is that immensurable constant of life.

Perhaps independent bookshop-publishers like City Lights might want to think about finding others to go about adopting an existing printer or forming a social venture/semi non-profit POD and low-volume printer because it seems (unless I'm mistaken) they're reliant on just a few corporations like Ingram Industries to produce their wares. It's more difficult to replace lost niche capabilities than prevent the loss of a functional business that needs retooling, (re)investment, and/or more customers.

0. https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_wa/602029331

But there was more to it than simply printing. There was the marketing to get it into bookstores, the hobnobbing, the ads, the shipping and returns. I suppose they could form a co-op and hire the talent.

"When bookstores, libraries, and schools order books for their brick-and-mortar locations, they use online catalogs populated by distributors. Even further, most distributors (including SPD, before it vanished) employ sales teams that work to get copies in Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores, and other retail outlets like gift shops."

Whatever you do don't use Lulu. They sell your name to some spammy India based robocall center that keeps trying to say they are interested in improving/buying your book.

I've had a book on Lulu for almost 5 years, and that hasn't happened yet.

> an alarming email on her phone. After 55 years, Small Press Distribution (SPD)—one of the last remaining independent book distributors in the US—was shutting down immediately, with no advance notice or transitional support. Its website went dark, its Twitter account was deleted, and no one was answering calls.

Why not give warning of imminent shutdown?

> To make matters worse, many small presses say SPD owes them money. “We’re owed upwards of $8,000,” says Gzemski. “We just released three books [at Noemi], and all of the preorder and event order revenue from those books has disappeared. [...] Goettel says SPD owes Black Lawrence Press more than $17,000—an enormous sum for a small press.*

Was the reason for no warning that they needed or wanted the incoming revenue, which they might not have gotten if they'd given a warning?

I wonder what was the impact of the internet making it easy for everyone to just put together a website and dump their content in it.

I'm not even considering self-publishing services. Just buying a domain, pay a hosting company to host your site, and make it available for everyone.

I've been stumbling upon a few sites that follow the "book as a site" pattern. Some provide a free tier along with a premium access, which sometimes includes additional services.

Why would anyone go through the trouble and cost of printing out a book if putting up a website costs pennies?

>Why would anyone go through the trouble and cost of printing out a book if putting up a website costs pennies?

The number of people who want to be able to call themselves a published author is far greater than the number of people who actually want to write a book for the sake of it being read.

The existence of digital & the Internet doesn’t stop people from printing books, photos or making other things IRL because physical artifacts matter. I like to be able to read a physical book, to lend or gift it later, to keep it on a shelf as a visual reminder about something, etc.; incidentally, seeing someone in the wild reading a book I know is awesome (even when it’s not used to start a conversation).

I don’t write books but I like to see my own photos printed (and buy others’ photobooks) for a similar reason. It’s less expensive to not print, but then it’s less expensive to not buy the camera in the first place, and at the extreme to not live at all I suppose.

The general answer to the question “why do people still print books when we have Web?” is “same reason do people do things anyway”.

***

Another answer (that applies in a narrower range of cases) is that sometimes you don’t want to make your art available to everyone. If you have a physical object, you can control its distribution for a while, you give it to friends who want it and appreciate your art and you feel good about it. Whereas once it’s out there on the Web, your work goes fully outside of your control. What uses will they put it to? The only thing you can be sure about these days is that it would be scraped and acquired for ML training purposes (and that is, again, far from what every original author would desire, believe it or not).

Would you mind sharing a few sites, I’m interested. Thx.

i've been trying to get this on the front page, glad somebody did!

book industry distribution is a wreck. this is so bad for independent literature, and the literary ecosystem as a whole.

fuck ingram. my dream is to compete with them.

Got ideas? I’m interested.

Am I the only one who thinks that, in a niche area that probably never got great distribution anyway, self-publishing though one of the major platforms isn't a pretty decent alternative? It's not like bookstores (with a few exceptions) are such a great distribution channel these days and you can always approach a few like City Lights to cut a deal.

For the kinds of books that were handled by SPD, the cost of POD will eat up all the publisher’s and author’s margin. This episode of the Other People podcast https://getpodcast.com/podcast/otherppl-with-brad-listi/how-... is an interview with Chelsea Hodson who started an indie press, Rose Press, which discusses a lot of the issues and is well worth the couple of hours listen to hear about how some of this works with some rather frank discussion of economics and logistics (Hodson, incidentally, decided not to use distribution and instead to only sell directly to consumers and bookstores).

i think chelsea hodson distributes through asterism now? i've bought one of the rose books titles from this distributor and she's tweeted about using them: https://asterismbooks.com/

It’s possible. The interview was from a while back and early in the press’s lifetime.

I think you don't fully grasp the role and importance of self-publishing. Their main goal is not maximizing how much profit you extract from a book, but persist content in a format that is both easy to distribute and to store perpetually. It's about cultural contributions and not the next best seller. There's a reason why some universities run their own publisher.

Oh nooo, middlemen dying, how awfullll

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