Borders (bookstores) Files For Bankruptcy, Owes Diamond (comics distributor) Nearly $4 Million

From ComicMix:

To say this portends major disaster is an understatement. Diamond is already in precarious financial straits, and they can no longer hide the fact that they have an account that’s millions behind which they may never collect. And their losses will ripple through to publishers, many of whom have no slack to survive the sudden hit to the bottom line.

Stay tuned. This is not going to be pretty.

Fasten your seat belts.

Digital publishing may be the future sooner than we think, if for no other reason that traditional book sales will be dead as the dominoes fall.

For publishers that aren’t owned by conglomerates, There will likely be moves to minimize whatever risk they have on the physical publishing side and hope to maximize revenue from the digital side of the business to ride out this crisis.

If I was a fledgling publisher, I wouldn’t even think of traditional publishing. There already was too much up front costs to begin with in an uncertain market, never mind the risk of never getting paid for the books you’ve shipped.