Seattle Bindery Newsletter: Issue #27. We welcome your comments.

1. Yet another rate hike. Don’t forget to remind your customers that USPS rates are slated to go up again, effective January 2001. Periodical postage is slated to go up about 10 cents, catalogs and books even more. Priority mail will increase about 15%, direct mail about 9%, express mail will be up 4%, and first class will go up to 34 cents. They just might want to print and mail those marketing pieces before the New Year rings in.

2. Quarterly Reports. Check out the Library section of our website to find the latest quarterly reports of some major public printers operating in our market. This will give you a fast and easy listing of how firms like ImageX, Consolidated Graphics, and printCafe are doing. For those of you who prefer the original source, although it’s slower, go to the Securities and Exchange
Commission website www.sec.gov to Search EDGAR Archives. Type in the name of the public company. There you will find all recent forms filed by the company.

3. More about tear-resistant envelopes. At the encouragement of many of our readers, we try to make our newsletter a little “edgy” and controversial. As a result, we encourage and have come to love your feedback. Our good friends at Seattle Envelope gave us theirs on the Tru-tech envelopes item in our last newsletter. They point out that Tru-tech envelopes are often four to five times more expensive than ordinary envelopes. Also, none of our local paper distributors stocks the paper, thereby creating longer lead times to ship from the east coast and higher minimum order quantities. Another disadvantage, they maintain, is that, as good as the Tru-tech tear-resistant
envelopes may be, they are still not as durable as Tyvek. Tyvek is made from a very light weight material, which may result in significant savings when postage is considered.

4. Website visitors. I’m always interested in discovering who visits the Seattle Bindery website. Here are the latest visitor stats: United States (1920); Canada (29); United Kingdom (12); Japan (12); Australia (11); Italy (4); Germany (4); Belgium (3); Slovenia (1); and Ireland (1). A visitor is defined as a unique IP address, usually shared by many people. I guess that’s why they call it the World Wide Web, not that any overseas business has fallen into our web . . . yet.

5. Publishing history. Per UpsideDirect, Upside magazine’s online daily, Random House has decided to split e-book revenues 50-50 with authors. Their righteous decision came on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision to try a case involving the New York Times and other publications being sued for violating contributors’ copyrights. Currently, these and most other publications pay authors only 15% of an e-book’s list price. This case will be one to watch.


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