Baker & Taylor Owes Libraries $33 Million. Check the Number Next to Your Name.

If your library prepaid Baker & Taylor for books it never received, you are owed money, and you are probably already on the list to get it.

That is not the piece I set out to write. I started from the fact that libraries are owed about $33 million and had claimed almost none of it, which looked like a field-wide failure to act. It is not. Most libraries are already on the schedule, and the reason it looked otherwise is a mistake I made and have since corrected on this site. What the schedule says next to your name is another matter, and that part you do have to check.

So here is the useful version.

What Baker & Taylor swore it owes you

When Baker & Taylor filed for bankruptcy in March, its CEO signed a sworn declaration. Paragraph 48 puts the company's general unsecured debt at about $120 million, in three parts:

• about $68 million to publishers and content suppliers
• about $33 million to library customers who prepaid through a leasing program "for books and media to be delivered by the company, but which Baker & Taylor was unable to deliver"
• about $18 million in other unsecured obligations

Those are components of the $120 million, not three debts stacked on top of it. Worth saying, because it is an easy thing to get wrong in a board packet.

Why almost nobody has filed a claim

I pulled the court's claims register on July 30, the first look after the general deadline passed, and again on September 10. The September pull holds 278 claims. Forty-five of them are public libraries, asserting about $2.8 million, or roughly 8.5 percent of the sworn $33 million. On July 30 it was 38 libraries and $2.3 million.

Eight percent sounds like a disaster. It is not, and this is the part that matters.

A bankrupt company files a schedule listing everyone it owes. If your library is on that schedule with the right dollar amount, and the company has not marked the debt "contingent," "unliquidated" or "disputed," then your claim already counts. You do not have to file anything. Filing is how you fix a schedule that is wrong about you, not how you get on it.

So the real question is not "did my library file." It is "did Baker & Taylor list my library correctly."

I checked. Baker & Taylor's Schedule E/F runs 340 pages and 1,894 creditors: 623 priority claims, nearly all wage claims listed at $0.00 for notice only, and 1,271 general unsecured claims, which is where the libraries are. I rendered the 183 pages of general unsecured claims as images and counted the ticked boxes, because the "contingent / unliquidated / disputed" labels are printed next to every single entry whether or not the box is checked, so a plain text search finds nothing. Then I checked every box in the whole 514-page filing a second way, by reading the checkbox glyphs in the PDF's own text layer. The two counts agree.

The entire schedule contains eight ticked boxes. Not one belongs to a library. Three are landlords owed lease-rejection damages. One is OCLC, which is suing Baker & Taylor. Two are individuals in litigation with the company. One is a publisher, Barefoot Books. One is a pottery company in Georgia that stores Baker & Taylor equipment.

Every library on that schedule is listed with a plain dollar figure, undisputed. Under the court's order, a library listed that way already counts as having filed, as long as it agrees with the figure. That is not a promise of payment. It is a place in line, and most libraries in this case already have one without lifting a finger. One entry is scheduled at $0.00 with all three boxes empty: Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois, which also holds a live distribution contract in Schedule G. A zero can be a correct balance or a missing one, and only Lincoln's own records can say which. It had not filed a claim as of September 10.

The two biggest library creditors did opposite things, and both were right

Palm Beach County Library System is the largest library creditor in the case, scheduled at $1,373,014.80. As of a register pull on September 10, it has not filed a claim. It does not need to. Its entry carries the full amount with all three boxes empty.

Richland Library in South Carolina, scheduled at $985,722.07, filed a claim anyway on July 16, the day before the general deadline, through outside counsel, for exactly the scheduled figure.

Neither made a mistake. Richland paid for belt and braces. Palm Beach is relying on a schedule that already says what it is owed. Both approaches end in the same place, which tells you how little the filing rate actually measures.

What the filers do measure is how often the schedule is right. Of the 40 libraries that both filed a claim and appear on the schedule under the same name or address, 3 filed the scheduled figure exactly and 9 came within 5 percent. Twenty filed for less than Baker & Taylor scheduled them. Eight filed for more: Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library in Ohio filed $154,110.00 against a scheduled $48,887.99, and Jessamine County Public Library in Kentucky filed $53,550.00 against $9,667.45. A library scheduled too high loses nothing by staying quiet. A library scheduled too low, like those two, loses the difference.

Who does need to act

Three groups, and they are narrower than the raw numbers suggest.

1. Libraries whose scheduled amount is wrong or too low. The schedule is what governs if you do not file. If it says $4,000 and you prepaid $40,000, the difference is only recoverable by filing a proof of claim. The court order puts the burden of noticing on you, not on the debtor. This is the ten-minute check, and it is worth doing even if you are confident.

2. Libraries with a contract but no creditor entry. Schedule G, the contract list in the same filing, names 53 counterparties holding live Baker & Taylor library distribution contracts. Thirty-five of them appear nowhere in Schedule E/F: Phoenix, Boston, Austin, Memphis, Nashville, Spokane, Hennepin County, Los Angeles County, Maricopa County, Provo, San Mateo County, Anchorage and 23 more, including two state agencies and four consortia. That is ordinary for this filing. Schedule G lists contracts and E/F lists debts, and most of the other 190 contract counterparties are absent from E/F too. The 35 were added to the case mailing list for notice (Doc. 67) and scheduled for no amount.

A contract is not a debt, and a library that prepaid nothing is owed nothing. But if any of those 35 did prepay, the schedule does not say so, and the ten-minute check below is the only thing that will.

3. Anyone who prepaid but is not on the schedule at all. This is the group most likely to lose real money, and it is not only foundations. Four libraries that filed claims have no entry in Schedule E/F under any name: Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Libraries ($140,198.96), Manchester City Library in New Hampshire ($35,143.79; the schedule's Manchester is in Connecticut), Harrington Library Consortium in Amarillo ($9,475.00; a differently named library system at the same address is scheduled at $1,250.50), and Twin Falls Public Library Foundation ($9,505.52). Library foundations and Friends groups are the members of this group the register cannot show you, because they are separate legal entities: if the money left the foundation's account, the foundation is the creditor, and a schedule built from library names may not have it. The schedule cannot tell you whether you are in this group. Your own bank records can.

If you are in any of the three, your deadline depends on what your library legally is.

September 14, 2026 if you are a governmental unit: a city or county library department, an independent library district, a school district library. That covers most public libraries and it has not passed.

July 17, 2026 if you are not: an association library, a 501(c)(3), a foundation, a Friends group, a nonprofit consortium. That one has passed. A late claim is not automatically worthless, but you can no longer simply file it. It has to be taken up with the court, which is a conversation for your counsel.

Which category you fall into is easy to get wrong. "We're basically part of the city" is a feeling, not a legal status, and if a foundation wrote the check then the foundation was on the earlier clock even when the library is municipal.

I am a librarian, not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

The ten-minute check

1. Open the Baker & Taylor case page at Omni Agent Solutions, the court-appointed claims agent. It is free.
2. Find your library in Schedule E/F, the creditor list, and note the dollar figure next to your name. If you are not there, check Schedule G, the contract list further into the same filing, and the amended creditor list at Doc. 67. Being on either of those with no E/F entry means you are scheduled for nothing.
3. Compare the figure to your own records: invoices, prepayment statements, leasing-program paperwork, purchase orders.
4. If it matches, you are done. Genuinely done. Close the tab.
5. If it is too low, or you are not listed, or you are listed only in Schedule G, or a foundation or Friends group made the payment and is not listed, file a proof of claim on the same site. It is free, it is short, and the last one I read was three pages signed by a finance person.
6. Claims must be received by the deadline, not postmarked. File electronically.

Be honest about what comes back

Baker & Taylor's May operating report shows $4,808,397 in total assets against $96,641,402 in liabilities. Nobody is getting made whole. If a distribution happens, unsecured creditors see pennies.

Money is also still being charged to the estate. Two law firms applied for a combined $548,941 in fees for work through June, and the court allowed both in full. One is the company's counsel. The other, Lowenstein Sandler, is counsel to the official committee of unsecured creditors, the class every scheduled library belongs to; the committee's members are three publishers and a landlord, and no library holds a seat. Professional fees are a normal cost of a bankruptcy, and they come out of the same pool.

Which is the argument for spending your ten minutes. Not because your library is about to lose a fortune through inattention. Because the schedule is a public record of who this collapse actually hurt, and a number that is wrong on that record stays wrong. Right now it shows publishers, workers, an IT vendor, and about $33 million in library money that reads as an afterthought.

Ten minutes. Free. Check the number, then get on with your day.

What has happened since, as of September 10, 2026

The first draft of this piece was written against a docket that ended in late July. Four things have changed since, none of which moves the September 14 deadline.

The fee applications were granted. On August 25 the court awarded Lowenstein Sandler, counsel to the creditors' committee, $288,151.20 in fees and $822.98 in expenses (Doc. 155). The next docket entry, Doc. 156, awards Paul Winterhalter of Offit Kurman, the company's counsel, $260,790.00 in fees and $2,266.85 in expenses. Both are the amounts requested.

Baker & Taylor filed a plan. In late August the company filed a Chapter 11 plan (Doc. 154). A plan is the document that will eventually say what each class of creditor actually receives. It has not been confirmed, and I have only the docket entry, not the document, so I am not going to characterize what it offers you.

There is a newer set of financials. The assets and liabilities above come from the May operating report, which already shows the company at zero full-time employees, against 19 when the case began. A report for the month ending June 30 has since been filed (Doc. 146). I have not read it.

Twenty-three more claims came in. The register went from 255 claims on July 30 to 278 on September 10. Seven are public libraries, led by Henrico County, Virginia at $198,371.52 and Stow-Munroe Falls, Ohio at $154,110.00. An eighth claim, filed by the City of Palo Alto for its library on September 1, asks $81,982.94 against a scheduled $36,064.90. Palm Beach County is still not among them.

None of this changes the check above. If you are a governmental unit and your scheduled figure is wrong, the deadline is still 5:00 p.m. Eastern on September 14, 2026.

Sources

The $33 million and the $120M / $68M / $33M / $18M breakdown: Declaration of Amandeep Kochar in Support of the Chapter 11 Petition and First Day Motions, Doc. 9, paragraph 48, In re Baker & Taylor, LLC, No. 26-12863 (Bankr. D.N.J.).

The bar dates: order entered June 11, 2026, Doc. 118, setting July 17, 2026, 5:00 p.m. ET for general claims and September 14, 2026 for governmental units, along with the standard exception for creditors already scheduled correctly.

The checkbox finding: Schedule E/F, Doc. 65, 340 pages (PDF pages 124 to 463 of a 514-page filing), 623 priority entries in Part 1 and 1,271 general unsecured entries in Part 2. The 183 pages of Part 2 were rendered at 150dpi and the checkboxes read as pixels, because the form prints "Contingent / Unliquidated / Disputed" as labels beside every entry and a plain text search cannot tell a ticked box from an empty one. The whole filing was then re-counted from the checkbox glyphs in the PDF text layer (5,682 flag boxes, 8 ticked, all in Part 2).

The eight ticked flags: three landlords (entries 3.166, 3.727, 3.749), OCLC (3.822), two individuals in litigation with the company, one publisher (3.87), and Craven Pottery (3.288), which the Statement of Financial Affairs lists as an off-site storage facility. Palm Beach County Library System is entry 3.849 at $1,373,014.80; Richland County Public Library is entry 3.953 at $985,722.07; both carry empty boxes. Lincoln Library is the one library-named entry scheduled at $0.00.

The contract libraries: Schedule G in the same filing (PDF pages 464 to 512), 243 contracts, 53 of them described as "Library Distribution Contract." Thirty-five of those counterparties have no entry in Schedule E/F under any spelling (a name-and-address search of all 340 E/F pages; a city name on another creditor's address, or a college in the same city, does not count as a match); each of the 35 appears on the amended creditor matrix, Doc. 67, filed the same day, which lists 38 library-type entities in all. The other three on that list, Connecticut Library Consortium, Fort Bend County Library and, at a different address, the Consolidated City of Jacksonville, do have E/F entries, as do all 15 contract libraries that are not on Doc. 67. The same search finds no E/F entry for about seven in ten of the 190 other Schedule G counterparties. Positive controls (Richland, Palm Beach, Brazoria County, Houston, New York) matched in the same pass.

Claim counts: Omni claims-register exports pulled July 30, 2026 (255 claims) and September 10, 2026 (278 claims), both archived in this project's research corpus. The filed-versus-scheduled comparison matches each library-named claim in the September 10 export to a Schedule E/F Part 2 entry by name and by address; 43 matched a single entry, two repeat filings (Kenosha, Chester County) count once, and the City of Palo Alto is reported separately, leaving 40. Delray Beach (two schedule entries at its address) and Harrington Library Consortium (a differently named library system scheduled at its address) are set aside. Four filers have no E/F entry under any name (Albuquerque/Bernalillo, Manchester NH, Harrington, Twin Falls Foundation); the same lookup found Richland, Stow-Munroe Falls and Jessamine. The library figure is my own classification: every claimant with "library" in its name, excluding a vendor (Library Ideas) and a trade association (the American Library Association), de-duplicating two libraries that filed twice (Kenosha, Chester County), and setting aside three academic and military libraries (OSU Tulsa, Occidental College, Hurlburt Field). Without that last exclusion the July 30 count is 41 and the September 10 count is 48; the dollar totals move by under $9,000. One governmental filer without "library" in its name, the City of Palo Alto, is discussed separately and not counted in the 45. All register amounts are asserted, not allowed.

Assets, liabilities and fee applications: Monthly Operating Report for the period ended May 31, 2026, Doc. 130; fee applications at Docs. 134 and 135, cited from their docket entries, both scheduled for hearing August 25, 2026.

The September 2026 update: the court docket on the claims agent's site, captured September 10, 2026, entries 110 through 161 (the last dated August 28). The Lowenstein Sandler fee order, Doc. 155, filed August 25, 2026, is saved in full. The Winterhalter fee order (Doc. 156), the plan (Doc. 154) and the June operating report (Doc. 146) are cited from their docket entries only; the documents themselves are behind a bot wall on the agent's site and I do not hold copies. The employee count is from page 1 of the May report, Doc. 130.

How these filings are sourced: how I report and source these filings.

Correction. An earlier draft of this piece, and the companion filing on the Baker & Taylor sale as published until July 30, said that hundreds of libraries had claims flagged disputed or contingent and would recover nothing unless they filed. That was wrong, and wrong in the direction that made the story more urgent than the facts support. It came from searching the text of a scanned court form, which reproduces the checkbox labels next to every creditor and cannot see which boxes are ticked.

The same earlier draft also counted "about a thousand" scheduled libraries; that figure came from Exhibit A of the same filing, which is Baker & Taylor's accounts receivable, the libraries that owed it money, not the other way round. Corrected July 30, 2026, verified by rendering all 183 pages of the general unsecured schedule, and re-verified September 10, 2026 across the whole filing.

What I have not claimed: that any library will or will not recover money; that the fee applications are improper; or that any professional body failed to notify its members, which I looked into and could not establish either way.

Disclosure: L/30 and MetisLib are mine. Both are open source, neither takes real patron data, and neither is sold to anyone. I also worked at Baker & Taylor, on the software side, years before any of this.