COVID and International customers

I get the impression that any subscribers outside of the US will no longer be able to continue membership and make purchases direct from LOA? Noticed a warning when I went to make purchase in the Fall sale. Is this temporary?

I wasn’t aware of the LOA issue, but Easton Press was refusing to ship many of its books overseas even before COVID, presumably for copyright reasons. Folio Society has recently been warning customers outside the UK to utilize their express shipping service (which is very expensive) because international shipping has become unreliable.

Our suspension of foreign shipping is temporary and is entirely because of COVID-related deliverability issues.

It's been a bit of a time-consuming and expensive nightmare: many packages were being returned to us, either because there was no available transport out of the country or because of delivery issues in the destination country; a lot of the books that did make it were taking three to four months to get to customers, by which time we had already refunded them; I mailed nearly 500 catalogs to our list a couple of months ago and nearly 200 of them were returned; etc.

We're not the only company facing this problem, obviously. After consulting with other publishers of our size (and several that are a lot bigger), we followed their lead and decided that it was best to suspend foreign shipping until the situation with the pandemic clears up.

We are truly sorry for this situation and we hope to be able to begin shipping again in early 2021.

--David

Thanks Dave, hopefully it’ll just be temporary. I was crushed to see the warning just because I like supporting LOA. In time, things will get better.

I received a copy of the new Shirley Jackson volume for Christmas and am really enjoying it! I can’t wait for LOA to resume shipping to Canada so I can make a big order!

Just heard from LOA and they told me they don’t know IF or when they’ll restart international shipping 😔 completely understand but sad. My whole collection has slipcases so can’t just buy on Amazon.

RRCBS: As someone who has advocated for higher shipping charges in order to get LOA books _directly_ mailed to _truly_ international customers (I live in Australia, now), I gotta say that the idea that LOA "can't" at least mail books to Canada (basically the 52nd "state", after Puerto Rico) is truly puzzling. (I know, I know: that would mean LOA was "obligated" to ship to ALL "international" customers, but, come on --- Canada? International? As in, more than a bike ride away?).

>6 RRCBS:

What about ordering from Amazon and buying the slipcases directly from LoA when they resume international shipping? The plus-side is you’ll get the dust jackets

>8 ironjaw: I throw away the dust jackets 🙂 plus much more expensive that way. But thanks for the idea! Realistically, I have a huge tbr pile anyway!

The only way to continue is throw out my slipcases, buy from Amazon and discard the jackets...