Bleeding Cool reports that comic book publishers have been told that Diamond Book Distributors will resume sending books to Borders this week. Before the bankruptcy announcements, Diamond had suspended all shipments to Borders.
However, Diamond has told publishers that Borders are still not sending back returns, so this is still a delicate situation. Borders still owes Diamond millions from before the bankruptcy, and it’s unclear how the bankruptcy judge will account for the existing merchandise.
Having just this week gone through a bunch of royalty statements from various publishers, all I can say is that if Borders numbers aren’t included in those returns, then we’ve somehow invented negative printing. Say what you will about direct sales contracting the market, but when books went out, they stayed out. There are a lot of publishers who if asked to take the last two years of returnable book sales and delete them entirely, might forgo that market entirely.
