Bankruptcy Filing Offers More Details into Baker & Taylor’s Stunning Collapse

In an unexpected development, Baker & Taylor this week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New Jersey, offering more details about the leading library supplier’s sudden collapse in 2025. The filing comes after the company revealed in court documents that it has fully repaid its secured creditor, CIT Northbridge Credit LLC, and is now seeking protection as it works to distribute any remaining funds to its unsecured creditors.

According to its March 16 Chapter 11 filing, Baker & Taylor checked boxes listing its number of remaining creditors as between 1,000 and 5,000; estimated remaining assets between $1 million and $10 million; and estimated remaining liabilities between $100 million and $500 million dollars, suggesting the remaining creditors will receive just a small fraction of any monies owed.  

In an accompanying declaration, Baker & Taylor CEO Amandeep Kochar put the company's "general unsecured obligations" at approximately $120 million, which is owed to "nearly 2,000" creditors, including roughly $68 million to publishers and suppliers; $33 million to libraries that participated in Baker & Taylor's leasing program; and $18 million in other unsecured obligations.

In the filing, several publishers are listed among the company’s list of top 20 creditors, with three of the Big Five making up more than $55 million of the estimated $68 million owed to publishers. Penguin Random House tops the list, owed more than $23.3 million, followed by Simon & Schuster ($16.5 million), and HarperCollins ($15.5 million). Other publishers among Baker & Taylor's top 20 creditors: Thorndike Press ($3.5 million); W.W. Norton ($1.98 million); Scholastic Teaching Resources ($1.94 million); Wiley ($1.54 million); Springer Nature ($1.43 million); Taylor & Francis ($947K); and Cambridge University Press ($885K).

Two libraries also make the top 20 creditors: the Palm Beach County (Florida) Library System is owed $1.37 million, and the Richland (South Carolina) Public Library is owed more than $985K. Other notable creditors: Library Ideas is owed just over $2.14 million, and Ingram Publishing Services is owed $1.77 million.

In an order this week, the court noted that the company’s March 16 filing lacked at least some required documents, and a hearing is now set for April 7 “to show cause why the case should not be dismissed.” Baker & Taylor is seeking an extension through April 20 to complete the required documents.

 A Long Slide, and a Quick Unraveling

In a March 15 declaration, B&T CEO Amandeep Kochar offered further details of the company’s longstanding “structural hurdles to profitability,” and its sudden collapse last year.

In the filing, Kochar, a long serving Baker & Taylor executive who led a group to acquire the company in 2021, said the company was “well-positioned” to recover from the pandemic and return to financial health until events “unforeseen at the time of the 2021 acquisition crippled its recovery and severely impaired liquidity.”

First, the filing states that Baker & Taylor’s operations were impacted in early 2022 by the emergence of the COVID-19 “Omicron” variant—although it is unclear how the lingering effects of Covid-19 in 2022 could be reasonably viewed as unforeseen. Definitely unforeseen, however, Kochar cites the impact of “two major cyberattacks” in August and November 2022, which “severely impaired Baker & Taylor’s operations, accounting and technology systems, further reducing liquidity draining cash resources.”

In response to these challenges, the company undertook a series of moves to ease its credit crunch, "including efforts to monetize real property assets" through the sale and leasebacks of its warehouses, the offshoring and automation of "warehouse and administrative functions," Kochar declared, as well as divesting "certain overseas divisions of the company."

However, “aging inventory depressed Baker & Taylor’s borrowing base” under its CIT Credit Facility, Kochar reveals, leaving the company unable to access the working capital needed to "pay down balances due to its major publisher vendors, and thereby obtain trade credit for new purchases.”

The beginning of the end came in late April 2025, when CIT put the company in default, effectively securing “all Baker & Taylor operating revenues,” as well as proceeds from the company’s sale of its Collections HQ property and Australian subsidiary James Bennett. The move effectively left Baker & Taylor with "no access to capital to pay even its ordinary operating expenses, absent CIT’s discretion," Kochar stated.

Unable to pay its bills, "trade creditors began to withhold further shipments to Baker & Taylor," leaving the company unable to fulfill customer orders," and exacerbating already critical "liquidity problems." Meanwhile, litigation against the company by OCLC, which alleges the misuse of OCLC’s WorldCAT data, made matters even more dire, Kochar stated.  

Against this backdrop, Baker & Taylor retained a financial advisor in July 2025 to help obtain new financing or a purchase, the filing reveals. That process yielded “27 expressions of interest” and five parties who presented “executed term sheets for potential transactions.” None closed, however.

Ultimately, in September 2025, came a lifeline: the company entered an agreement with ReaderLink, which, upon closing, would have employed absorbed "approximately 700 of Baker & Taylor’s approximately 950 employees as ReaderLink employees," with the remaining to continue under “a Transitional Services Agreement” through the end of 2025.

“However, on the morning of September 26, ReaderLink announced that it was withdrawing its offer,” Kochar stated, which left the company “with no realistic means to continue its operations.”

What’s Left?

Meanwhile, in a separate declaration, Daniel Scott Fishman, Managing Director at Riveron, the financial advisory firm hired by Baker & Taylor in July 2025 to oversee its restructuring efforts, further detailed the company’s collapse and its aftermath.

Following the collapse of the ReaderLink deal, Baker & Taylor immediately began “urgent efforts to wind down its business operations and divest discrete parts of its and its affiliates’ assets and operations,” in cooperation CIT, its main creditor, Fishman states.

With the help of a liquidator, Baker & Taylor dispatched with “the majority of its inventory and fixed assets” sometime between October 2025 and January 2026, “obtaining an aggregate amount of approximately $8.7 million from these efforts.” In addition, the company “liquidated the majority of its accounts receivable,” bringing in roughly another $11 million.

With Riveron's help, the company then sold "certain discrete business components," including its "ebooks and e-audio" business to an upstart company called LibraryOne Digital, Inc., and sold Baker & Taylor Publisher Services to Lakeside Book Company.

“As a result of the foregoing wind down efforts, on February 13, 2026, Baker & Taylor retired the full balance of the CIT Credit Facility,” Fishman states, “which had stood in excess of $30 million in August, 2025.”  

But while Fishman states that Baker & Taylor’s wind down efforts “have met with considerable success,” mounting challenges remain from “protracted and expensive litigation by vendors, contract counterparties, former employees, and others,” he states.

The declaration points to three separate class action lawsuits by former employees, alleging violation of Federal and state “WARN” acts, and the ongoing litigation with OCLC over the misuse of WorldCAT records.

“Contesting these and other matters has imposed significant strains on management and required allocation of limited resources which otherwise would be available to pay creditor claims,” Fishman stated, adding that defending these actions "is simply unsustainable for the company at this stage," prompting the chapter 11 filing.

“Orderly liquidation under the protection of the Court is best suited to maximize creditor recoveries without the disruption of continued litigation and demands by individual parties,” the filing reads, noting that Baker & Taylor "continues to employ a small number of employees, principally to assist with collection of receivables, wind up the company’s affairs, and complete the transitional services for which the company receives payment from LibraryOne."

Meanwhile, Baker & Taylor’s officers, including Kochar, continue to draw "sharply reduced" compensation, the filing adds, as they "continue to enforce Baker & Taylor’s rights to collect accounts and contract rights, many of which are complex and require institutional knowledge to collect effectively."