Faxon's Future in Question

Faxon's cash-poor parent company, divine, collected money from at least 3,500 libraries but spent the funds on operating costs and debt payments at its other subsidiaries, says the Chicago Tribune. Divine now plans to pull the plug on Faxon, a division of RoweCom, which may result in the sale or eventual dissolution of the subsidiary.

But it's not all bad news for subscribers. Several publishers—including Elsevier, John Wiley, and Blackwell—agreed to fulfill Faxon's subscriptions through January 2003, while many other publishers are awaiting a possible purchase of Faxon and the results of a financial investigation led by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

It's still unclear what all this means for libraries that paid for subscriptions in advance. Ideally, divine or a new buyer would agree to fund existing obligations, but if that doesn't happen, publishers and libraries may have to absorb some of the losses.