There’s a new fire to put out in publishing. The industry has taken a recent hit with the abrupt closure of Small Distribution Press (SPD), an American-based distribution house that serviced over 300 small and independent presses. On 28 March, SPD announced, with little to no warning, that they would be ceasing all operations effective immediately. There seemed to be no transitory phase in place; the only consolation offered by the 55-year-old SPD directed their clients to contact their partners to discuss future distribution options.  

This news left hundreds of indie publishers in the lurch, and yet some have been questioning whether SPD’s clients should have seen this coming. After all, the distributor is no stranger to controversy. Back in 2020, an anonymous former employee at SPD writing under the alias of “Damaged Book Worker” published a scathing article on Medium detailing the abuse and exploitation they experienced working for the distributor. As a result, other SPD employees then came forward with their own experiences, and an open letter circulated— signed by over 300 book industry workers — that demanded, among other things, the resignation of SPD’s Executive Director, an audit of the distributor’s payroll, and compensation for the affected employees. Brent Cunningham, the former Executive Director of SPD, did eventually step down in 2021, after an internal investigation (the details of which were never published). But affected employees like Damaged Book Worker have yet to see compensation, and now never will.

Understandably, this controversy inspired many indie publishers to drop SPD as their distributor in 2020, in favor of seeking out a more ethical alternative. And yet many stayed. Four years later, these same “loyal” clients are now grappling with the repercussions of SPD’s shocking closure. 

But how shocking was it? Aside from SPD’s financial abuse of its workers coming to light in 2020, the distributor announced as recently as 2023 that it was launching a GoFundMe to raise $100,000 — the cost of transferring all of the books from their Berkeley, California warehouse to the warehouses of their partners, Ingram Books and Publishers Storing and Shipping (PSSC). “With this funding,” said new Executive Director Kent Watson at the time, “SPD will now be able to offer more options to speed publishers’ books to each and every reader around the globe.”

Then, a year later, when SPD closed its doors for good, the distributor made sure to remind its publishers that its “inventory of 300,000 books is in safe hands, having been transferred to our SPD Next partners Ingram Content Group and Publishers Storage and Shipping (PSSC) over the past several months. [Publishers] will need to contact Ingram or PSSC to discuss distribution options and the return or disposition of [their] books.” 

In other words, SPD conveniently doesn’t need to deal with the fallout of their closure. Perhaps they had even been prepared to shut down.

Regardless, the literary community has come to the defense of SPD’s floundering former clients, some of whom were told they had only until 17 April to make other arrangements for the stock being stored in Ingram and PSSC warehouses, or else the books would be recycled. Some publishers were even told that they will need to buy back their books from Ingram.

However, there are those — like Damaged Book Worker, who now runs an Instagram account critiquing the publishing industry — who feel less than sympathetic towards SPD-distributed presses, claiming that the warning signs were clear. 

The closure of SPD has, undoubtedly, called into question (yet again) the morality of the publishing industry. Is there a way to be a truly ethical cog in this capitalist, monopolizing machine? In the wake of Damaged Book Worker’s 2020 exposé, authors like Elsa Valmidiano proposed that her fans purchase her work straight from her, but while this does cut out the often questionable middleman, the middleman — unfortunately — exists for a reason. 

With Amazon controlling over 50% of the print book market (and nearly the entirety of the e-book market), “Big 5” publishers competing to buy each other out, and the closure of distributors like Grantham Book Services and SPD, the independent publisher feels on the brink of extinction. “No one is serving the independent publishers,” said Sanjee De Silva, a publisher at Sweet Cherry.

While this is true, people like Damaged Book Worker might take De Silva’s statement a step further and implore us to consider the warehouses, the paper mills, the printing presses — who is serving those workers?

Who stands up for them?

***

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash