In its original bankruptcy filing in New York's Southern District Monday, the Boston publisher of Mark Twain and Curious George listed $2.68bn in assets and $3.53bn in debt. Among its leading unsecured creditors are Chicago-based RR Donnelley and Williams Lea, who are each owed more than $20m.

By Wednesday, the publisher indicated it already had a restructuring plan in place that is approved by 90% of its secured creditors as it sought permission from U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber to borrow $400m of a $500m loan facility to pay contractors and employees as it quickly moves to restructure.

Under New York and federal bankruptcy law, RR Donnelley and Williams Lea could theoretically be among the last creditors to be repaid, book publishing expert and Fordham University Marketing professor Al Greco explained to PrintWeek.

But Greco quickly noted that since HMH's main business is in hard cover and softcover school textbooks it simply can't risk not paying its print suppliers. "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will have to continue to print books in the K-12 sector for at least the next seven to 10 years and someone is going to have to print those books. If they give nothing to those two printers, they will have a difficult time getting any printer in North America who would be willing to do their work, fearing they would be the next one to get nothing," he added.  

HMH could turn to China for their textbook printing needs, since the hard-cover, soft-cover and work books are not time sensitive, Greco said, adding: "But this is international news and I would assume any printer around the world would be willing to take them on, unless they pay upfront COD, or they have letters or credit. So they really can't afford to walk away from these printers they need the printers more than the printers need them."

Greco is very familiar with the commercial printing industry having served as executive director of the New York Metropolitan Lithographers Association, representing workers at 113 commercial printers in the greater New York area.

Much is being made of the transition in the publishing world from print to electronic, but Greco said the HMH bankruptcy can't solely be blamed on that, instead suggesting it is the far more common story of a company simply taking on too much debt.

Houghton Mifflin was sold to Riverdeep Holding in 2006 for $1.75bn. The next year, Riverdeep acquired Harcourt Education, Harcourt Trade, and Greenwood-Heinemann divisions of Reed Elsevier for $4bn.

"It was over-leveraged and revenues declined," Greco explained. "If they had not been put together and not been loaded up with debt, it's hard to say what would have happened, but I'm not sure they would have ended up in bankruptcy."

He added he expect business as usual for the text book printing side of HMH for the short term, noting: "They obviously must have printing orders for the next one to two months because in the K-12 business, the ship months are July and August."

Greco said HMH also announced in their bankruptcy documents that they planned to go public sometime in early 2013. "That would make it even more risky to pay those two commercial printers nothing," he added