Libraries across the country are looking for new sources after one of the country's largest book vendors announced its closure. Baker & Taylor sold books en mass to thousands of libraries. The closure will have a ripple effect, according to Cincinnati Hamilton County Public Library's Holbrook Sample. He says most of that effect will be behind the scenes.
“It may be we do some extra work, and hopefully you won’t notice a thing,” he says. “Hopefully you won’t feel a thing, and you‘ll get what you need.”
Holbrook says Baker & Taylor shipped books in a way that made it easy for CHPL to receive the books and get them on the shelves.
“They do a lot of extra work for other public libraries — like all the processing we do in-house, some libraries actually have Baker and Taylor do that processing,” he says. “The closure of Baker and Taylor for us has less impact than it does for other libraries.”
Sample says the company made it easy to get books and put them on the shelves.
“They send them to us in a certain way so that we can process them and catalog them very quickly.”
That processing includes putting barcodes and RFID tags on the books, and entering them into the card catalog.
Sample says that assembly line may have to be changed to accommodate shipments from other vendors. That could mean some new releases will take longer to get to library shelves.
He says the library has already started getting books from other places.
“Ingram, that other vendor, they didn’t want this to happen. It’s not like this is a victory for them,” he says. “They’re faced with trying to serve all of these public libraries that are scrambling and it’s testing their ability to do it.”
A spokesman for Kenton County Public Library says they have also started shifting to other vendors. Chad Showalter says the change means some titles will take longer to show up on the shelves.
“In the meantime, we encourage library cardholders to explore digital loans for those same books through our digital library,” he says.
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