Recently, magazine distributor Anderson News announced that it was adding a seven-cents-per-copy surcharge for all publishers “to offset losses and stay in business”. Many publishers not only announced they wouldn’t be paying the extra fee, but that they’d stop doing business with Anderson. Distributor Source Interlink announced that they, too, would be adding the surcharge.
Among those affected are The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, according to publisher Gordon Van Gelder. Van Gelder warned readers that “copies that were distributed through Anderson News Corp. or Source Interlink might not be distributed right now. Most of our newsstand and bookstore distribution won’t be affected, but some people might find F&SF absent from their usual spot.”
Asimov’s Science Fiction Editor Sheila Williams told SFScope that all the sf magazines will be affected, because everyone uses Anderson, but she sounded a hopeful note. Anderson isn’t the sole source of distribution for any of the magazines, and their business doesn’t affect subscribers or most bookstores (from where the bulk of the sf magazine newsstand sales come).
Today, the Knoxville News is reporting that Knoxville-based Anderson “suspended its business operations over the weekend after major publications stopped shipping magazines” to it. Anderson said it’s going to keep talking with publishers and retailers, but “it had no choice but to cease operations immediately because it was ‘incurring unsustainable costs.'” The Knoxville News has the full press release issued by Anderson on this page.
[Edited 10 February 2009 to add this link to a Reuters article which reports that Source Interlink has filed a suit against many of the US’s major magazine publishers. The suit claims that Source Interlink instituted that seven-cent-per-copy fee to pay for “retrieving unsold inventory from retailers, tabulating and destroying it,” but the publishers balked at the charge, and then stopped shipping magazines to Source Interlink and instead spread rumors about the company’s financial state. More in the linked article.]