But the short, short version of what this most recent development is: Diamond will return all the books that have been sitting in their warehouses back to the publishers, and give them the money they made from selling the books they didn't have the right to sell. It's essentially a "best case" scenario as far as the publishers are concerned, and I suspect that any non-invested parties would recognize this as the "correct" outcome.
But it leaves me still scratching my head a bit. Back in June of last year, I wondered a bit at what Ad Populum's game was. None of the decisions they were making in the wake of actually buying Diamond made sense to me. Not just in a "I can't see what their gameplan is" way, but in a "looking at this through an MBA lens, every one of their decisions is 180° wrong and you would only choose to do that if you were actively trying to destroy the business" way. This settlement falls into the same category.
Don't get me wrong. Like I said, this is the "correct" outcome here. But this is from a settlement, not a ruling. Ad Populum conceded that they absolutely should not make any money on the inventory they had in stock. But if they weren't going to fight for that, and they closed -- not sold, just closed -- tbe portions of the business that were profitable... what do they have? Like, seriously, after all this over the past year and a half, Ad Populum spent something like $20 million plus a year's worth of court and legal fees for... what? The Diamond logo and maybe some cheap warehouse and office space? You'd think that if Ad Populum's intent was a (poorly conceived) attempt to just get a hold of the backstock cheaply and make money off selling that, they wouldn't have settled the matter; it would've gone before a judge who would force them to return all the inventory. But no, like virtually every other aspect of this whole mess, they basically just gave up even the potential revenue opportunity.
Seriously, this sounds like the plot of Brewster's Millions where the entire point was just to waste a crap-ton of money as quickly as possible.
The only other explanations I can think of is that someone at Ad Populum has a grudge against someone at (old) Diamond and wants to make sure they watch the company die in the worst way possible, or it's part of some money laundering scheme. Every single decision Ad Populum has made in this over the past year and a half has been the absolute worst decision you could make if you were trying to actually purchase an exisitng business and try to make some money off it. Unles there is a LOT of super-secret, shady AF, illegal stuff going on that isn't publicly known, I don't see any way Ad Populum doesn't lose every single dime they've sunk into this venture.
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