Great article...I'm glad I read it, because as a lover of literature and books I've been kind of putting my fingers in my ears and going "la la la, I can't hear you" when it comes to what's going on in the publishing industry. On the one hand, I've gotten access to so many great books that I wouldn't have without small independent publishers. But on the other, the internet has been such a great resource for finding some of the best books I've read in the past few years. I hope that what's happening now is just growing pains and that in the future we'll continue to have access to great new writers.

Oh, and as a fellow Jain (by marriage, I'm American) I love seeing Priya Jain's byline. More by her, please!

omg this is the first I've heard of this and we subscribe to all three - McSweeney's, The Believer and Wholphin. I'm always the last to know these things.

Well, "the check is in the mail," guys. No, really!!! You can count on us!!! I couldn't live without McSweeney's and The Believer, I swear. (Wholphin is for the spawn, it's his thing...)

(I mean, just look at my screen name for pete's sake!)

Were this article published in 2009 or 2010, it would be unremarkable, but since we are at the end of such a long, long run of prosperity it's actually newsworthy. Time was the economy could be counted upon to have a serious wringing depression/recession every 10-15 years. Companies and investors expected it. We've gone 70 years without a real cruncher, but no more. The next few years will show that the housing boom was simply a cover for the criminal theft of the productive assets of the United States. Genuine productive assets have been saddled with greater debt loads and more centralized management. (Who needs a national burger chain or chain of coffee houses anyway?) All it takes for the entire house of cards to come down is a minor but significant mistake. in this case, some purchasing agent at Target or Walmart made a business decision, this set off the entire avalanche. Centralization (in botany that's called monoculture) is at fault. The fundamental truth is that wealth is generated by the indie publishers, not the service businesses they use. Centralization forced them into this mess.

As the cost of money rises and the US finds that it has exported real productive assets only to be replaced by low quality of earning service businesses here, this story will be repeated in a hundred ways. Bankrupcy is a moment in time. One can get there a hundred ways, corruption and malfeasance for sure, but also failed marketing expectations, inability to roll over notes, lack of a pool of qualified talent for a critical position (ex. the astronomical wages of CEO's)etc.. So get used to it! Perhaps you might learn to be less credulous when your boss/president spins an obvious self serving manipulative lie! Show Some Spine!

Good luck from an old sour Manufacturer's Rep.

... a small press distributor based in Berkeley, CA.

http://www.spdbooks.org/

Possibly a good solution for some of the small presses out there.

I've purchased great stuff from them.

never liked McSweeney's. The combination of bad graphics and spurious reasoning led for some very sad reading. The only audience seemed to be the creators, and those who idolized them.

I'm less happy about what's happening to the indie publishing industry, but think there's an ultimate lesson. At some point, somebody's got to read this stuff.

The magazine Punk Planet also got caught up in this mess. It's dead now, as announced just a few days back.

www.punkplanet.com

video eulogy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz6oOkdm2FU

Maybe the internet will become all the richer for this.

Thanks much for this article! I work at an independent publisher, and I can definitely tell you that the AMS bankruptcy has been beyond dramatic-- we know so many who got laid off or whose business is or was in deep trouble-- the reverberations have been felt everywhere. And the indies are always the ones that suffer most. I feel like I haven't seen this issue covered as well as it deserves to be in the mainstream media, and I don't feel like people outside the book industry universe have been able to grasp how big a deal it was, so I really appreciate this good summation.

I second the nod to Small Press Distributors, and want to note that NBN took on some of the PGW's old accounts too, so there's still a bit diversity out there. And to those who love books but aren't paying attention to the publishing industry-- do! (If nothing else, it's often really interesting to follow.)

There are some newspapers, particularly that darling of the upper middle class left, The Guardian (UK) which are not public or even private or closely held corporations. They are public trusts. That's the legal definition of how they are formed and organized. Perhaps niche interests like the Indie Press should investigate it. And I don't mean some macrochaotic tiedyed cooperative either. I mean a public trust. Look it up. You still have to make money but a public trust has some tax and organizational benefits.

I worked for an independent bookseller for years, and remember well how dependent we were on Publishers Group West for small-press books the big distributers like Ingram never heard of.

But what people who shop only at the big chains like Borders don't understand is that without small-press distributors like PGW, the only books you'd find in the chain stores would be NYT best-sellers.

Independent booksellers will order directly from small presses at customer request, but the books take longer to receive and cost more than ordering through a distributor like PGW.

PGW also distributed a catalog of all its small-press books, so independent booksellers could order in large lots the same way they order from Bertelsman and other giant publishers.

The fall of PGW doesn't hurt just small publishers; it's a blow to independent booksellers and all of us who want to read anything not written by Michael Crighton or Maeve Binchy.