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Archive for August, 2006

Dear Members, Newsletter – August 2006

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

It’s hard to believe that almost a year has passed since the terrible devastation of Hurricane Katrina. PaperBackSwap members pulled together in the months afterward and donated more than 4,000 books to those in need before we were asked to “hold” book shipments—the New Orleans Public Library had no place to store them!

Since then, many of you have inquired about when you will be able to send books to the libraries of New Orleans. You have not forgotten Katrina or its victims. We are glad to tell you now that, although the New Orleans Public Library is still rebuilding, we have managed to find a local company there that is willing to store our donations until the library is ready to receive them. We finally have an address for you!

The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books in an effort to restock the shelves after Katrina. The library staff will assess which titles will be designated for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising.

Please send all book donations to:

Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70112

If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate, which is slightly less than the book rate.

Many, many thanks to our PaperBackSwap family for pulling together to help other booklovers in a time of desperate need!

Richard & Robert
Co-Founders, PaperBackSwap

PBS Delivery Confirmation: Newletter – August 2006

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

PBS Delivery Confirmation is going like gangbusters! Many of you are taking advantage of the Quick Credit/Guaranteed Credit feature, and enjoying watching your books get scanned as they travel to their new homes. Less expensive than DC purchased through the PO, and Guaranteed Credit to boot! You can find out more about this feature by reading the items under “PBS Delivery Confirmation” in the Help Center.

The Help Center: Newsletter – August 2006

Monday, August 7th, 2006

The Help Center Oh, didn’t we mention that? You may have noticed the new gold button in the left menu of every page on the site. The old PBS FAQs have been rewritten, updated, and given a facelift. We are still adding items as need arises, but you should be able to find the answers to most of your questions about the site with just a couple of clicks. Click the gold “heading” buttons (the ones with the arrows to their left) to reveal a list of Help Center items in a dropdown menu. There is also a Quick Help box on the right side of the page, for those questions very frequently asked. Please explore the Help Center before contacting us with a question—as the club grows larger, we are having a hard time keeping up with feedback messages, and we want to continue to be responsive to those questions that need personal attention. The old FAQs were difficult to wade through; we hope the Help Center will…well, help! Even experienced members might learn something new there—take a look!

SwapaCD.com launched on August 7, 2006! Newsletter – August 2006

Monday, August 7th, 2006

SwapaCD (www.swapacd.com) launched on August 7, 2006! Within 2 weeks, we had over 3,000 members, and more than 18,000 CDs available for swapping! You can easily transfer your PBS account information to your membership at SwapaCD–just click the CD icon at the top right of the PBS banner to do this. Also, did you know that you can transfer credits back and forth between sites? Turn books into CDs, and vice versa! Check out SwapaCD—it’s as good as it sounds.

APO/FPO Membership: Newsletter – August 2006

Sunday, August 6th, 2006

We have hated the need to exclude these addresses from the club. There are a lot of factors involved in shipping to and from APO/FPO addresses, and for a while we just didn’t have the features in place to make this feasible. But we have been working very hard to find a way to open PBS to our military, and are thrilled to announce a “pilot program” for membership for those at APO/FPO addresses! If you have such an address, or know someone who has one and might like to join PBS, have him or her contact us. We are so happy to be able to provide a source of books to these women and men serving our country. There will be more information about APO/FPO addresses in the Help Center soon; we can’t wait to get this off the ground.

Wish List Size Restriction: Newsletter – August 2006

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Everyone has now had sufficient time (nearly 6 months!) to edit his or her Wish List down to the limit of 200 books. The limit will be enforced on September 5, 2006. Any wish list having more than 200 books after August 31 will be edited by the PBS system. The system will first remove books for which the wishing member is furthest from the “front of the line”. After doing this, if more than 200 items still remain on a list, the computer will remove items for which the member is “1 out of 1” people wishing for the book. If you’ve been procrastinating, don’t put it off any longer: trim your Wish List now!

Multiple-book requests and PBS-DC: Newsletter – August 2006

Thursday, August 3rd, 2006

The “Order More Books from this Member” button allows requestors to link requests together in a “bulk order” that can be handled as one transaction. Shipping books together saves postage, and also the DC barcode generated by printing a wrapper for a bulk request will earn Quick Credits for ALL books in the shipment when it is scanned and the information is transmitted to PBS! However, if you receive multiple requests from one member who did not use the “Order More Books from this Member” button to link the requests together, each individual DC barcode on each wrapper will carry the code for only THAT book. Requests can’t be linked together after the fact. So if you receive more than one request in a day, and you plan to use PBS DC on the wrapper, take a peek at the address for each request first (download it WITHOUT the PBS DC option), BEFORE you print with PBS-DC. If multiple books are going to the same address, you can simply print ONE of the DC wrappers to send them all together. It still means you will get only one Quick Credit for the wrapper you use, but it will spare you having printed (and paying for) extra DC barcodes that you won’t be using. You will get the other credits for the rest of the books in the shipment when they arrive and are marked received. We are working on a way to “alert” senders to multiple book requests submitted individually, but so far have not found an efficient way to do this.