We have scoured all of the offerings from USPS to international. The rates we are offering are the best we have been able to find. /quote wrote:
I have plumbed the labyrinth of the USPS services offerings/restrictions/tariffs and the cheapest is:
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-M-bag-Service
where it is stated :
- Frequently utilized by foreign students who attend school in the U.S. and want an inexpensive way to send their books home.
- M-bags may be sent to PO Boxes™. M-bags are returned to sender if they are undeliverable at no charge.
This seems the ideal way to ship these books for those in no particular hurry.
I weighed my book. It registered at 0.605 lbs.
For 12 copies, it comes to 7.26 lbs and if the printing materials err by 10percent, the 7.986 won't exceed 8lbs.
The worst case cost for 8lbs is a dime shy of USD40.
Perhaps you can relook and quote this shipment method. Oops, just discovered
that a substantial number of countries are not supported. Bummer.
Mine is. It is what it is.
Supported countries are listed here: https://pe.usps.com/text/imm/immc2_039.htm#ep3175218
I am no rocket scientist so my conclusion might be wrong - is the bag free?
There may be tons of forms and customs declarations and individual country
restrictions to consider. For my country, pornographic printed material is forbidden in the shipment.
So maybe a visit to the local postie to get it straight from the horse's mouth so to speak.
I include the table here for easy reference:
Jay Angler wrote:
It would be really helpful though if you somehow post the picture with parts labelled? I'm not even sure where you are putting the wood in for example. There's a lot of "stuff" in the picture and I think most isn't part of your set-up, but I'm not sure. Some simple diagrams might help a lot.
paul wheaton wrote:
Edward Lye wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_mail
Can you give me a link to a carrier with rates?
paul wheaton wrote:
Edward Lye wrote:For me, the cost of postage is the prohibitive factor. Is surface mail available?
I don't know what that means.
Yes, the shipping is nuts.
If you want just one or two books, Shawn has stuff set up with amazon all over the globe. But that's a "print one book at a time" thing. Expensive.
What I am doing is getting 10,000 books printed all at once - this makes it so that I can get a better price per book. And then I can ship via media mail in the united states, which is pretty cheap.
I'm okay with shipping overseas, but I have not found a way to do it cheaper. I suppose that there could be somebody in a different country that could get 10,000 more printed and they have access to cheap shipping. But I cannot think of a way for that to work out.