Why Baker & Taylor's Collapse Was Just The Preview

I need to tell you something that nobody else is saying out loud.

I was at Baker & Taylor when Follett bought them in 2016. I left a few years later and went into legal tech, where I spent years reviewing vendor contracts that law librarians signed. I have an MLIS. I have an MBA. My NDAs are expired.

And when I read that Follett is now positioning themselves as the savior of libraries after the Baker & Taylor collapse, I need you to understand exactly what happened here.

Because this isn't a one-time crisis. This is the beginning of the end of the vendor model as we know it. And that's actually good news - if you're ready for it.

What Actually Happened: The Timeline Nobody's Connecting

Let me walk you through this slowly, because the trade press has been reporting each piece without connecting them.

April 2016: Follett Corporation buys Baker & Taylor for approximately $1 billion. At the time, B&T is one of the two major book distributors serving libraries in North America. They've been in business since 1828. One hundred and eighty-eight years of institutional knowledge.

I was there. I watched what happened next.

Summer 2019: Follett closes the Reno, Nevada and Bridgewater, New Jersey distribution centers. More than 500 people lose their jobs. The official reason is "cost savings" and "operational efficiency."

What that actually means: they're stripping the company of the infrastructure that made it work. Distribution centers aren't just warehouses. They're where experienced staff pick, pack, and ship orders. They're where catalogers process books. They're where institutional knowledge lives in the people who've been doing this work for decades.

I was one of those people. That summer, I was let go in the layoffs. Not because I wasn't doing my job well - I was. Not because my team wasn't performing - we were. Because a spreadsheet in some corporate office somewhere decided that the cost of paying experienced people could be cut by 40%.

So I had to reapply. For my own job. Same responsibilities, now including chq/Axis360/print management on top of everything else. No pay increase. No bonus. Just "congratulations, you're rehired at the new lower rate with more work." I watched colleagues choose not to come back. I watched years of expertise walk out the door.

When you close distribution centers, you don't just lose square footage. You lose the people who knew how to do things right. You lose the institutional knowledge that can't be written down. And yes, you lose experienced staff who refuse to accept being devalued.

November 2021: Follett sells Baker & Taylor to a private investment group led by Aman Kochar. After five years of ownership, after closing distribution centers, after laying off hundreds of workers, Follett walks away.

They didn't sell because they found a better opportunity. They sold because they'd already extracted what they wanted.

2022: Baker & Taylor gets hit by a major cyberattack. Systems go down. Orders get delayed. Libraries scramble. The company never fully recovers operationally.

September 11, 2025: ReaderLink announces they're acquiring Baker & Taylor. Libraries breathe a sigh of relief. There's a path forward.

September 26, 2025: Fifteen days later, the ReaderLink deal collapses. The sale falls through.

October 2025: Baker & Taylor lays off 523 employees. Another 261 follow in subsequent months.

January 2026: Full closure. Baker & Taylor, after 198 years in business, is gone.

The Damage Nobody's Quantifying

Here's what the trade publications reported: "hundreds of millions in book orders" affected. Publishers writing off debts - HarperCollins alone took a $13 million hit.

Here's what they're not reporting:

The money libraries already paid that they'll never get back. Prepaid accounts. Deposit balances. Standing orders that were paid for but never fulfilled. Conservative estimates put this at $30+ million across roughly 4,000 library systems.

Your library might have had $5,000 on deposit with B&T. Maybe $50,000 if you're a large system. That money is gone. It's an unsecured creditor claim in a bankruptcy proceeding, which means you'll be lucky to see pennies on the dollar.

The fiscal chaos hitting library admin staff right now. If your library had open purchase orders with Baker & Taylor, those are encumbrances against your budget. Money you committed but can't spend elsewhere - and can't close out cleanly. Fiscal officers are scrambling to figure out how to reconcile books that were never delivered against funds that were already committed.

The collection data nobody can access. CollectConnect, the tool multiple states used for IMLS annual report submissions? Hosted by Baker & Taylor. That data is in limbo.

The market consolidation that just accelerated. We went from a market with two major distributors to a market dominated by one: Ingram. Ingram is now the only game in town for most libraries. And they know it. (For more on library vendor consolidation, see LibrarianShipwreck's analysis and Marshall Breeding's 2025 Library Systems Report.) As NPR reported, since Baker & Taylor began winding down, around 2,000 libraries have set up new accounts with Ingram.

Now Here's The Part That Makes Me Furious

Follett is back. Follett Content Solutions is positioning themselves to capture Baker & Taylor's former customers.

Let me read you the quote that set me off:

"We're using the institutional knowledge that Follett had when we owned B&T, combined with some of the best talent at B&T."

Institutional knowledge. They're claiming institutional knowledge.

Follett bought Baker & Taylor. Follett closed the distribution centers and laid off hundreds of experienced staff. Follett sold the hollowed-out company to investors who ran it into the ground. And now Follett wants to rescue you with their "institutional knowledge"?

That's not institutional knowledge. That's a company returning to pick over the carcass of the animal they killed.

What This Means For You

If you're a librarian reading this, here's what you need to understand:

Your vendor is not your friend. I know that sounds harsh. I know you have a great relationship with your sales rep. I know they remember your kids' names and send holiday cards. But those sales reps have quotas. Their job is to sell you services at the highest margin possible. Your job is to serve your community with limited resources. These goals are not aligned.

The people making decisions at these companies often don't understand libraries. During my time at B&T, I watched executives make decisions based on metrics that had nothing to do with library service quality. I watched cost-cutting measures that prioritized short-term savings over long-term sustainability. The people in the C-suite were not thinking about whether your patrons could get books on time.

Every library that was 100% dependent on Baker & Taylor just learned a $30 million lesson about vendor risk. Single points of failure in your supply chain are existential threats. If your entire book acquisition workflow depends on one company, you are one corporate decision away from chaos.

I know some of you had no choice. Your consortium picked B&T, or your state contract locked you in. That's not your fault. But now you know what that dependency costs - and you can start building alternatives.

The Questions You Should Be Asking Right Now

Before you sign anything with any vendor - Follett, Ingram, anybody - ask these questions:

"What's your current turnaround time from order to shelf-ready, and what credits do we get if you miss?"

If they dodge this question, you have your answer. A vendor confident in their operations will give you specific numbers and specific remedies. Vague promises about "excellent service" are worthless.

"Where does my collection data live, and can I export it if I leave?"

Your processing specifications. Your MARC record preferences. Your physical processing instructions. Your order history. All of it lives in their system. Ask them explicitly: if you terminate the contract, do you get that data? In what format? At what cost?

"What are your fill rates, and how is that calculated?"

Fill rate sounds simple - what percentage of items you order do they actually deliver? But vendors calculate this differently. Some exclude items that were never in stock. Some exclude special orders. Get the specifics.

"What happens to my money if you go out of business?"

This is the question nobody asked Baker & Taylor. Prepaid accounts. Deposit balances. What protections exist? The honest answer is usually "none" - but at least you'll know.

Here's The Part Nobody Is Telling You

You don't actually need them anymore. Not the way you used to.

The tools exist - right now, today - for libraries to do their own cataloging and processing. The Library of Congress has free, public APIs that give you MARC records. Open Library has metadata for millions of books. Your ILS can import records you generate yourself. Processing labels are just PDFs you print on die-cut stock.

I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it's appropriate for every library. But I am saying that the black box of vendor dependency is optional. The gatekeeping that made you believe you couldn't do this without paying $3-5 per item? That gate is open.

This series is going to show you how.