Hey Nina - congrats on getting this out!

I wanted to let you know that there's something a bit odd about shipping costs for international packages. I picked 20 books, and shipping (to Canada) was either $70 or $122, depending on the selection. Seemed a little strange, so I thought I'd let you know.

Whew! Just got back into town to an empty envelope :( But hooray for automatic replacement!

I'm sorry you've had so many go missing in the mail (for the record, I'm a $10 backer and I got the original 4 + the the signed single just fine).

You are being inappropirately critical of the USPS here. I won't deny that they've got a LOT of issues, but they do manage to move many billions of items from points A to points B without fail.

Unfortunately, your packaging (at least for the 4 books) was inappropropriate, and thus didn't survive in the mail system. I'm not saying they didn't fail (they should have rejected the lot, rather than take them and run them through systems they weren't suitable for), but blaming them entirely isn't right.

I happen to have kept the original envelope (pretty stamps!), and I haven't done anything with the 4 copies yet, so I can examine the whole package and try to draw some conclusions.

It's a bit shy of 3 oz on my scale, it's standard letter envelope sized (4 x 9.5"). The books are 3 1/2x 5 1/4". 4 books stacked in the envelope comes out to about .230 on my calipers (call it 1/4"). The stamps on the envelope totaled 84 cents. This value tells me that they charged you the standard rate for letters & cards (http://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/notice123.pdf first page has the letter rates). That rate is for stuff that they can put through their fully automatic systems (the notes on the side indicate when you can't get that rate).

Looking at note 1 in that previous table, it says to look at the DMM 101.1.2 for details of what makes something 'non-machinable'. I found that at http://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/manuals/dmm300/101.pdf . If you look at section 1.2, item d, you can see that they have a rule about items that 'cause the thickness of the mailpiece to be uneven'. This rule exists because they know that if you give their big sorting gear something that isn't very uniform, the sorters will chew up and spit out your mail, as happened here. Here's a video I found that includes some of their sorting gear: http://www.youtube.com/watch… .

Note phrases like '30000 an hour' and notice how the letter cancelling machines are moving the letter along - two press rollers that clamp the letter on either side and shoot it along. Now imagine what happens when those rollers hit a significant bump in the envelope.

The singletons probably all got through OK - they don't have as much variation in the thickness.

Two things went wrong here:
You didn't know (and you may have had no way to know) that this packaging was a disaster waiting to happen.

The USPS should NEVER have accepted this from you. When you showed up with a box full of these things, they should have said 'whoa! These aren't gonna work!'. They should have charged you more per piece and they should have handled them as non-machinable. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons (including clerks who try to be 'nice' and save you money on postage!) they don't always reject things that they should.

Thanks! I got my signed one!

Min arrived, but bookless =(

I got mine like a day or two after you posted Update #11. Which surprised me, as I'm in Switzerland and I thought you hadn't yet sent out the international orders then. Re-reading this update now, I think I must have missed the "some" in "except to some International addresses".

The envelope was in near-perfect condition and also filled with 30 instead of the promised 10 books (+ the one signed copy). Yay. :-)

Now to distribute those all ...

I got mine! They are lovely!