I thought comics were ineligible for Media Mail (nothing bound and printed with ads was allowed). When I was selling on ebay, there was a clerk at out local post office who always asked if there were comics included when I shipped something Media Mail and would not allow it. He always threatened if I tried to slip one past him a and it got found by a postal inspector, the package would not arrive at its destination and would be returned to me (and there might be a penalty). I never cared enough to verify if he was correct or not, and I don't know id things have changed in the ensuing decade and a half.

-M

He was technically correct. He was also a douche.

In Canada if you send something with a CD internationally in it you have to say so, then it is three to four times the postage to what the exact same thickness and sized but CD-less item would cost. I was selling on Amazon and Ebay when overnight the postage would go sky-high on some things. It totally killed art print sellers for example. Plus more paperwork than ever in duplicate was required where before it was a simple small square you checked one box on and signed. I'm not sure if this was due to change in out government then or elsewhere or (probably) both.

Print fanzines are almost a dead artform, people say they might be anyway. The few I still get from England or The U.S. spend more on postage than on anything else.

In Canada the federal government changed how the post office did it's accounting one year... went from millions in surplus to a deficit (requiring general rate hikes, continual fights with the postal employees union), there was even a top appointee whose actual line was that there would be no snail mail at all in the near future (now long passed) because everything would be electronic. I don't like any kind of activist or grand vision person in any office normally. I am all about if it's not broke don't 'fix' it, but the cause voter has increased in number and we see more dramatic swings from one vision to another, ugh. The one constant is the people at the bottom paying more, sometimes exponentially more, all the time. You can throw the balance off on a working engine so that it finally ceases to work altogether. We are all living this in various ways. The old engine may have been boring, may have been designed by someone no longer around, but it worked for the majority. The exciting fancy new supposedly streamlined one that a small number are true believers will take a lot of people down hard I think. Throwing out old rules for stimulation where those rules were made for a practical hard learned reason by some narrow field visionary, someone applying a small solution large scale to everything, that's all your eggs in one basket. Nature/God loves variety, it is a strength... diversity = robustness.

So we are supposed to be divided and angry at postal unions by some maniuplator at the top who has engineered our costs to go up by a factor more than explainable by union contracts (they often have fewer members doing more work than ever anyway), but the weakening and locking out of unions had never benefited non-union workers (of which I have always been one myself). It's a myth, it's a divide and conquer us vs. them ploy, and you can be sure the CEO patterned after the private glamour magazine types will be taking a massive bonus. Our postal system is infrastructure for us all, in every part of our countries, and has definitely helped build out economy... we screw with that over some new math numbers on paper at our long term peril. I hate that people have to find out the hard way. I know the postal rates on some things have wiped out a lot of opportunities; diverse, small scale, while at one time opportunity was on the increase thanks to the internet... what large heavily-financed concerns has this closing off benefited? When all our eggs are in their basket and their private shipping is when they would get paid back for their 'investment', and you will find yourself traveling miles to a community mailbox/center when they shrink the 'enemy' of the postal worker down to below minimal numbers. Making things more expensive and less accessible is never progress. Something that we could afford in the depression was declared as not sustainable a few years ago. Now we have all these communal mail boxes constantly broken into, having to be repaired and replaced, talk of dropping from five days a week to four or five, fewer employees, fewer small businesses flourishing, bigger bonuses for supposed cost-saving for a political appointee.

I've been around just long enough to see and know too much sometimes and I'm not sure how to communicate it always, and then again some people are absolutely intent on not listening. "Nobody buys physical comic books anymore, certainly not by mail"... well, if you believe that you can influence reality into closing that all off. "Nobody writes letters anymore, nobody need snail mail." They did though, and it was good, and it will always at least 'have been'.

For The books that I'm bidding on now, I will ask the seller to send it priority mail and just pay the extra postage. 

You should always declare it whenever you send drugs or explosives through the mail too. Those post office fellows have absolutely no sense of humour about that kind of thing.