Please review these two very important changes taking place within our club:
1) As you may have already heard, the USPS is increasing postal rates which will change the rates for mailing books. Keep in mind, this is a USPS Change that we do not control. Starting Sunday January 8, 2006, the new Media Mail rates will be:
* Under 1 lb $1.59
* 1 lb to 2 lbs $2.07
In order to be prepared for this increase, PBS will begin calculating the new postage rates on book wrappers as of Saturday, January 7th. This will allow for those members that print wrappers over the weekend to have the accurate postage applied for mailing their books.
A member suggested using 2 60-cent stamps and 1 39-cent stamp to equal the new Media Mail rate. You may want to purchase stamps ahead of time in these quantities for mailing future books.
Please continue to use Media Mail rates whenever possible. Most book requests are less expensive using this rate. Occasionally for small/thin books, it is cheaper to send books via First Class. However, if you choose to send a book using First Class, please be sure to mark out the Media Mail stamp on the wrapper. Additional postal information will be available in the FAQs.
2) Another major change that will be taking place in the system as of January 7th relates to the Return Address for the book wrapper. There are thousands of PBS books that are mailed all over the country every day. Unfortunately, we are receiving books returned to us each day for missing postage and improperly hand-written labels. This requires us to sort out each situation and to re-mail these books. This is time-consuming and expensive. To eliminate this problem we are changing the return address on the book wrapper to the sender’s address. If you are concerned about privacy and do not wish to use your return address, you may rent a USPS PO Box or you can still select to use our address for the return address. To use our return address, you will need to make this selection in your Account Settings.
If you do choose to use our return address, then Please Note: You will now be charged a book credit for any book returned to us so that we can correct the mailing situation; this means you will forfeit your credit for mailing the returned book.
Thank you for preparing in advance for these important changes. Should you have questions regarding mail rates or return address changes, please use the feedback section of the club to present your questions.
Tags: Shipping Books & USPS
