A bankruptcy court has decided in favor of the Perseus Book Group in the competition to acquire the distribution clients served by Publishers Group West.  The decision ends a spirited competition between Perseus and NBN (National Book Network -- see 'PGW Decision Due Today').  The court chose Perseus even though NBN's bid provided publishers with a higher percentage of the money owed them by PGW.  It seems that Perseus had locked up the three biggest publishers in the former PGW crew, and as the first company to make a serious bid for PGW's business, Perseus had an advantage over latecomer NBN.

Meanwhile some publishers are worried about Baker & Taylor's bid to take over portions of PGW's parent company, Advanced Marketing Services.  It seems that when B&T took over the assets of the bankrupt book distributor Koen, B&T sent much of the Koen inventory back to publishers (some of it in boxes bearing the labels the publishers used to send the books to Koen).  AMS management chose B&T as a 'stalking horse,' which means that if some other company does come in with a bid higher than B&T's $76.25 million offer, the higher bidding company will also have to pony up an additional $2.4 million 'stalking horse' fee that will go to B&T.