The Canadian publishing industry is still reeling from news last Thursday that the largest independent book distributor H.B. Fenn and Company has begun bankruptcy proceedings. There are many expressions of sorrow and support for CEO and founder Harold Fenn and his family, who built the business over more than 30 years. But even as publishers, booksellers and authors wonder why Fenn fell, they are now also facing the uncertainty left in the wake of the announcement.
Fenn’s largest client, Macmillan, quickly stepped into the void on Friday to advise its customers on how to access its titles. In an open letter to Canadian booksellers published in the Canadian publishing trade magazine Quill and Quire, CEO John Sargent wrote that the company’s immediate concern was “to insure the availability of our titles across a wide spectrum of Canadian accounts.” Since Macmillan does not have systems set up to ship trade books directly into Canada, Sargent asked that booksellers order from wholesalers, and designated Ingram as “a primary vendor.” Sargent later explained, “Bookstores can order from wherever they like, but the place where we’ll try to make sure we have all our titles represented is Ingram.” Asked about Macmillan’s longer term plans for Canadian sales, he told PW the company was “evaluating all our options at present.” That was much the situation at Creative Homeowner, whose Eric Zimmerman said its plans are still evolving.
Eleanor LeFave, owner of Mable’s Fables children’s bookstore in Toronto, offered a bookseller’s perspective and said one problem with using Ingram is that it is more difficult to return books across the border.
LeFave went on to say the news left her feeling “extremely uneasy” about the future of the industry. The initial statement from Fenn attributed the company’s woes to “the loss of distribution lines, shrinking margins and the significant shift to e-books.” LeFave said the Internet has disrupted distribution arrangements that have been critical to the Canadian industry. “The general public can buy around. They can go to Amazon,” she said, comparing the situation to the music industry’s woes in the past.
The Canadian branch of Oxford University Press was one of the few Canadian publishers Fenn represented. President David Stover said he hoped that a resolution could be worked out that would make the best of a bad situation. “The sense I have is that if books are out there in the market and at stores and if stores hold on to them and continue to sell them and sell through stock, that’s a way better situation than if everybody decides to return all at once to Fenn,” he said. “What I think we don’t want [is] another sort of General Publishing situation,” he said, referring to the end of another big Canadian distribution company in 2002, “where everything just implodes, then it is bad for booksellers, it’s bad for the publishers who are represented by the distributor, bad for the industry as a whole. And I think there’s still a really good chance that that can be avoided in this situation, if everybody is reasonable, if discussions take place between the main parties.” Stover added: “There’s a difference between an orderly wind-up, in which most people get paid or get paid most of their money, and sort of a panic where it is just bad for everybody.”
So far, however, PW’s requests for information about the bankruptcy proceedings and H.B. Fenn’s future from the financial company overseeing the bankruptcy, Grant Thornton, have gone unanswered
