We've been having similar problems with Ingram (not B&T), off and on.  Books
can and do take weeks to get here, even when pre-ordered well before the
publication date. And it's not a matter of being processed by Ingram; this
can and does happen with both processed and unprocessed titles. I've
contacted our rep several times in the last year, and service does gets
better for a while afterwards. But I can't count on it, and we've started
ordering high demand titles and purchase requests from Amazon, simply
because I know they will arrive in a timely manner. It's still a frustrating
world out there and sometimes I wonder if things will ever get back to
normal. Fingers crossed the supply chain recovers at some point, but not
yet.

Nikki Maounis
Camden PL

-----Original Message-----
From: Maine Libraries Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf
Of Nancy O'Toole
Sent: Monday, April 10, 2023 4:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MELIBS-L] Question for the hive

In all honesty, we've had quite a few rocky patches with Baker and Taylor
since the start of the pandemic. Our most recent was earlier this year.
Fortunately, we're in a good spot right now, but there were times where we
would pre order books only to have them show up more than a month after
publication. This included the latest Louise Penny, which was very in demand
with Auburn's patrons. Earlier in the pandemic, we had a lot of issues with
items remaining in limbo for ages, but the last few rounds of problems have
mainly been related to book processing time.

As a result, when we notice that things are slow, we contact Baker and
Taylor and ask them to send us our books unprocessed. This won't impact
books that are too far down the pipeline, and doing book processing in house
is much more time consuming. Given that we already do a portion of the
processing here, it's been manageable. Typically what happens after this is
you get a very large order in the mail, so be ready! After that point, we
continue to order our books unprocessed for a little while.
Figuring out when to go back to processed can be the trickiest part as Baker
and Taylor is not very open about their predicted processing times.
We usually end up testing the waters by sending one of our smaller orders
processed, and then seeing how long it takes.

Obviously, this is not an ideal way to run things. Not knowing about the
specifics in Waterford, I don't know if you're having the same issues, but
this information helps someone regardless.

Nancy O'Toole
Auburn Public Library


On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 11:24 AM Waterford Library <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Is anyone else having trouble with B&T?
> We placed an order March 10 and haven’t yet seen or heard anything.
> Calls and emails have been inconclusive.
> Thanks.
> Waterford Library
>