Baker &Taylor — a book company that acts as a middle man between libraries and publishers — went out of business in October. How is the Estes Valley Library dealing with this? Pretty well.
“Yes, Baker & Taylor was our main book supplier,” said Barbara Jo Limmiatis, community relations specialist for the library.
“Thankfully, we have long-standing accounts with Ingram and other book distributors. We were in a good position to begin shifting our purchases and adapting our workflow as soon as we learned of Baker & Taylor’s closure. The biggest challenge for us was shifting all of our cataloging and processing in-house,” said Limmiatis. “We recruited several community volunteers to assist with this process until we can receive ‘shelf-ready’ books agains.”
Will this change cost the library more? “At this time, it is not costing us more, but until we receive shelf-ready books, we won’t know the true cost of this change. We anticipate that it will cost about the same,” she added.
Acquisitions Librarian Kathleen Kase reported that the library spent spent $59,157 on materials from Baker & Taylor in 2024, which includes print materials and processing.
Processing includes the cataloging record, barcodes, spine labels, genre labels, covers, tracking tags, and more. Basically, all that makes the book ready to go straight to the shelf when it comes out of the box.
“If we did not budget for processing, we would need to hire staff to do this tedious work. Paying for processing is more economical for small libraries like ours. We are extremely grateful to our community members who are volunteering their time to complete the processing during our transition to Ingram,” said Limmiatis. “They are helping us keep our costs low and get books to our shelves in a more timely manner.”
Patrons can still find the latest titles in slightly different formats — like e-books or e-audiobooks on Libby, Cloud Library or Hoopla. Older or hard-to-find books are available through interlibrary loan, which delivers weekly.