Lockdown, Delayed Supplies, and Great Bookish Community
I thought I would be able to go through this lockdown without any additional announcements, but it seems reasonable to say a couple of words about the current situation. And say thanks to the members of our community.
I’ve been able to ship almost all orders without major delays even while I was limiting my ventures out of the house since mid-March.
Delivery of Materials
However, in the past few weeks, I’m having more and more problems with supplies. Wooden materials are delivered in 3-4 weeks after I place an order. It seems that Plexiglas that I use for the book scanning frames are not available in the Netherlands at all until early June. And even the plastic that was previously delivered the next day nowadays arrives at my house with a week’s delay.
Hopefully, as the Netherlands starts to retract the lockdown in the upcoming weeks gradually, most of these problems will go away. However, there’s no warranty for that.
In any case, I will continue doing my best to make and ship all of the orders in a timely manner.
Postal Services’ Increased Delivery Time
The other thing that affects my customers a lot is that in some countries, postal services have stopped providing their services or do that with huge delays.
While most of the European countries (including Italy) operate almost nominally, I see that in the UK orders are delayed by 1-3 weeks.
However, the longest delays happen in the US. In the past couple of weeks, I started receiving messages from customers that orders shipped at the end of March and in early April were finally delivered. This means that packages are delayed by 2-4 weeks.
That’s really upsetting, and I’m sorry about that. But there’s absolutely nothing I can do about that.
Once again, I hope that in the upcoming weeks, the situation will become much better.
Great Community
I want to say thanks to all members of our community and customers of iBookBinding’s shop. They are very understanding and supportive in these days of the global crisis.
I always knew that the bookish community is a very nice one. But these past weeks were a real test, and I’m very impressed.
Many thanks to all of you who made orders and kept iBookBinding running, and all of you who follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and watch our podcasts on YouTube.
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