Last week Koen Book Distributors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in U.S. District Court in New Jersey just one week after admitting that it would not be able to fill orders for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  The bankruptcy filing indicated that Koen owed almost $14 million, much of it to major publishing houses such as Random House ($2.8 million), HarperCollins ($2.6 million), Penguin ($1.6 million), Simon & Schuster ($1.5 million), and Time/Warner ($1.4 million). 

The Chapter 11 filing will allow Koen to reorganize and restructure and perhaps to emerge as a lean, mean distribution machine.  The distributor has a large and loyal customer base in the Northeast, which should help, though the market trends are working against independent book distributors and the independent bookstores they service.  A few years ago there were fifteen independent regional book distributors across the U.S., but today there are fewer than five.  When the independent bookstore WordsWorth Books, a Harvard Square institution for almost 3 decades, went belly up last year, Koen Book Distributors was its largest creditor.  In addition to facing financial hits from the gradual attrition of independent bookstores, regional distributors also have to face increased competition from national book distributors such as Ingram and Baker & Taylor.