At Signed Books Direct: not what I had planned, but…

With intense regret and annoyance, Signed Books Direct will be going “Sold Out / No Inventory Available”, and therefore unable to complete any sales, for the immediate future.

The (apparent) across-the-board demolition in the US of the “de minimus“ non-dutied handling of low-value parcels, which makes sales into the US even possible for a lot of small businesses, begins on August 29th.

The problem right now—along with the end of the policy itself—is that no one really knows how much sending parcels to the US is going to cost any more. Some sources are suggesting that, depending on the country or trade bloc from which such parcels are being sent, the recipient could be forced to pay anywhere between USD $80 and USD $160 per package just to get them released from customs. …And does that amount include any tariff attaching to the place they’re being sent from (the EU, in my case) or does an additional tariff get attached on top of that?

No one seems to know. 

For a small-business manager, this is not an ideal situation. AT ALL. I sell people legacy-edition signed books. I can’t honestly expect anyone to value these enough to pay three or four (or five or ten) times a book’s value in import tariffs. It’s nuts.

(sigh) I’m hoping—admittedly, against hope—that some kind of sense will prevail over the next month or two. Or three. Or something.

So here’s what I’m doing.

Shutting down an operational online bookstore is a big move to make at this particular point in the crisis. For now, it seems wisest to me to simply reduce all the inventory numbers of the books in the store to 0. Since the store has always been instructed not to sell items when there’s no inventory on hand (because duh…), this will prevent orders from being completed without my actually having to pause (or close down) the store.

For those of you interested in acquiring used books of mine (or Peter’s): please bear with us while we wait to see what happens to this situation over the next month or three.

Meanwhile, thanks so much for your patience.

(And meanwhile, you can always still buy ebooks over here at Ebooks.Direct. So please do.)