Remember when AMS news dominated GalleyCat‘s pages? It wasn’t all that long ago, but once the court decisions were handed down and PGW went with Perseus, things got a little more quiet. Except, of course, they didn’t, it’s just that the media got disinterested even though a handful of publishers who elected not to go with Perseus or any other distributor for the moment are getting undue unpleasantness by way of AMS’s attorneys. One non-consenting publisher, Paul Joannides of Goofy Foot Press, has gone so far to file a motion in bankruptcy court to have its contract rejected. “They are refusing to let us have our stock, and now they are withholding our money on recent sales that just a week ago they assured us they would pay,” Joannides said in an email to us.
But as that story plays out, so does the fate of AMS, now officially in the hands of Baker & Taylor after court approval of the $76 million dollar sale. PW Daily reported yesterday that Baker & Taylor has created Baker & Taylor Marketing Services and, beginning Monday, resumed shipping new titles to the warehouse clubs. The purchase, which also includes UK and Mexico assets, involves a range of assets used by AMS to sell bestsellers and other books into the membership warehouse clubs. The San Diego Union-Tribune had more on this story last week, including the news that post-bankruptcy, AMS lost more than $1 million per week in January and an even higher sum in February. Bruce Buechler, an attorney for the creditors, said the losses could total up to $2 million a week. “It’s a sad day,” said Bud Leedom, publisher of San Diego’s California Stock Report, who noted that AMS was one of the region’s oldest companies trading on Wall Street. “When they were founded in the 1980s, San Diego wasn’t a place that was known for publicly traded companies,” Leedom said.