Getting books from printers to retail outlets is a large and complex undertaking. It typically involves the services of specialized intermediaries: distributors and wholesalers.

A distributor specializes in warehousing, marketing, and delivering books to retail outlets. Its clients are independent publishers. A distributor can itself be a large publisher.

A wholesaler is like a passive distributor: it stores a large number of titles and ships them to buyers, but does no active marketing for the titles. Its clients are buyers: bookstores, librarians, online booksellers, and other outlets.

Independent sales reps and rep groups sell books to bookstore buyers in their territories, typically representing a number of independent publishers. They differ from distributors in that they do only the selling.

Jobbers ("rack jobbers," or "IDs"--Independent Distributors) service book racks in supermarkets, drug stores, airports, and other non-traditional outlets. Their purview is mostly mass-market bestsellers and books of regional interest, and they have exclusive control over what goes in the racks.

These intermediaries arose in response to gross inefficiencies in publishing business. The essential problem is that there are tens of thousands of producers (publishers) who wish to place hundreds of thousands of products (books) in tens of thousands of retail outlets (booksellers). The vast majority of publishers and booksellers are small and do not have the resources or staff to deal directly with one another. On the publishing side, furthermore, traditional offset printing dictates that entire runs are printed up front, leading to the expense of warehousing. Finally, on both sides is the expense and time involved with ordering and returning books to and from multiple entities.

Although on-demand digital printing is rapidly changing the way books are distributed, these traditional intermediaries will still play a major role in the business. The following sections describe them and their roles.