In general, I still prefer physical media, but that largely comes from distrust. I have seen enough publishers disappear and things go out of print and become unavailable that I have a distrust of the streaming providers to still be there and offering something. I have seen shows pulled from streaming providers due to license expiration. If I have a physical copy, I usually can go back to it if I need to. Plus, in the past anyway, the physical copy was of a higher signal quality.

I should probably stop now. I think I am just rambling at this point.

[...] emails with him, code archives, photos” …and a Twitter hashtag #pdftribute (via Kerim) Jason Scott, acerbic but believeable and Dan Gillmor and Gardner Campbell, who points to Matt Stoller’s [...]

ive just been pointed to this page, i ordered the deluxe version dvd in january 2012 for £56 and nothing. emailed em and nothing, the site vanished and nothing
no paypal refund either

Here’s a workaround I use………….

When you sign up with BPM, you get local shipping addresses in 6 countries.
Drop points include: USA, UK, Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg. You then use these for buying from whom you want, regardless

of where the seller ships or not.

You then have all your purchases combined into one, even from the different countries, and use the parcel mail forwarding service to have

everything sent home in only one shipment, wherever you are in the world!

Membership for renting these addresses and using the service is only 5€ per month.
You can check it out on http://www.bpm-lux.com.

Fixed-price listings on eBay, perhaps?

Wildly variable (and expensive) shipping costs? There’s a shipping calculator for that….whatever it costs, the customer’s paying, not you.

Customs forms? eBay’s shipping tools spit them out too.

Want something in return for the extra steps involved? Include a handling fee.

Just my $0.02…..

Hmm.

Well, BetaArchive (http://www.betaarchive.com/) has 4.7 TB of beta and abandonware software and games.. (not to mention SDKs, etc!)

You’re archiving history. Those miriads of demos, maps, mods, little gaming tidbits are history from previous era. Thank you for your effort.

Awesome! Incidentally, by saving Fileplanet (which has kinda sucked for around a decade) did 3dgamers.com’s great software archive get saved by accident? I can remember being really pissed off when IGN sucked in and destroyed that site.. and then seeing that they sucked in Gamespy and thinking- oh, here we go again.

It’s not me.

There seems to be a couple of Amazon vendors selling to international customers. The catch is, price is $90+shipping. Triple… LOL.

Are you one of the vendors, Jason? Pretty clever profit maximizing, if so. No problem with it here I ain’t no commie. Not gonna pay $90 either, though.

Yes. US of A needs to reduce their foreign trade deficit so they make it harder, much harder, for their people to export.

Makes sense, eh?

It’s been more and more difficult to get anything from stateside. I use a remailer in Florida, it works well but it’s not cheap. The big thing is that they consolidate parcels.

So if you get a whole bunch of wannabe-orders from South Africa, lemme know and we can ship them all in one big box.

Aww man! Now I regret I never got around to ordering your so-fars in the last few months when I finally could. Will you be able to make downloadable versions available of them retroactively, at least? Or am I just completely out of luck? (I can’t begrudge you the decision, though… things are as they are.)

You may let your customer know about services like https://bongous.com/

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Not sure if this helps or not, but I’ve heard lots of people use Fedex, DHL and similar services because it’s both simpler and more secure, although way more expensive. I’m not sure if Fedex in the US works the same as it does here in Brazil, but when I had to use it at my job it was a simple matter of filling a *small* form online, scheduling when *they* would come to our address to pick up the package, and paying the fee. Why don’t you look into it? I guess most of your potential international customers won’t want to pay $40+ for shipping, and you’d get some e-mails asking whether it couldn’t be cheaper, but a few among them would pay, and you could always reply with a “no, sorry”.

I just found the same issue sending off some DVD sets to Canada (footage from a retro TRS-80 Color Computer show held this past weekend in Chicago). I don’t blame you.

If you fill it out online, you have to run through a bunch of typing by hand, and then print it out, and then cut it to attach it to the packaging. And the costs are still onerous.

I’m sorry to hear this. I have both LAMP and BBS, and I’m a little sad that I won’t have physical copies of your next three. But I understand that you would not do this lightly and that there is only so much asshattery one can take before you just gotta throw up your hands and say “fuck it”. I do still hope that there’s a solution out there that you’ve not thought or heard of yet. Good luck.

Form 2976 or 2976A? You can fill it out online: https://www.usps.com/ship/customs-forms.htm

I had to fill one out once last year by hand, very annoying and tough to fill all the info on such a small form. The clerk at the post office said that the form I filled out was only valid for a few shipping options. My response was “whatever is the cheapest that doesn’t require me to fill out another one of those awful forms!” Needless to say, if I ever have to ship internationally again (I also tend to avoid it due to cost), I’ll be filling 2976 out online!

As an international purchaser I both understand your decision, and wish it hadn’t been made so difficult for you.

Possibly the answer is to refer international buyers to one of the services that will accept delivery (in the USA) and reship at the purchaser’s risk? At least some of those will also consolidate packages into one box for on-shipment, which can sometimes reduce the overall shipping charges enough to offset the labour component. (Such services used to be called “friends in the USA”, but these days some companies have realised there’s a market opportunity there.)

Ewen