I think you have to figure on the price of postage to ship a book, now $2.13 (usually) minimum, plus whatever you paid for the book, which is variable----I get a fair # of mine for <$1, though not usually in the 50c range.  I get a lot of them at Goodwill, which charges 99c for pb's and $1.99 for HB's.  I figure with the price of postage plus the book, even if your time and effort isn't worth anything at all, $3-$3.50 or even more is about what it costs me to get a credit from sending out a book.    I have been making a challenging game of it for myself and have been very successful, and have been selling credits myself, but lately never for less than $3 each---that price will have to be re-evaluated after the next postage increase, too.    Sometimea you can buy stamps for less than face value on Ebay, and I have another source for them at <FV, too----but it still runs in the range of $3++  for each credit. 

I think that people are not truly evaluating what they cost when they complain about them!!

It doesn't cost PBS anything when I trade a book with someone else!

It most certainly does. The owners of this site have kept it and the sister sites free of membership fees for almost 3 years now. Do you have any idea how much it must be costing them for high end servers to host the site, programmers to keep the site running, the T1 communications line from AT&T that I know from experience costs several thousand dollars a year but is absolutely necessary to run a website of this caliber...not to mention the time and energy they put into the site which they are not getting paid for. I think R&R are absolutely wonderful to continue to provide this service to us for free because somewhere along the line I'm thinking they must have sunk serious money into creating and continuing it.

Have you tried the Book Bazaar forum?  I go there every time I need to buy credits.  There are plenty of PBS members who are usually willing to sell credits for cheaper than the going PBS rate.  Check it out!

You may not be heartless, Kris, but you still aren't looking at the whole picture. The cost of running this site is what it costs for you to be able to make that trade with someone else. And those costs must be offset and that is part of the rate of credits, another part is the consideration that if you could get the credits cheaper than swapping, most people would take the cheaper way, and then as said, eventually we would run out of books to order.

The last consideration is that the credits are basically the "money" standard on the site. And just as a bank must have an amount of money invested and ready to liquify to pay out on a "run on the bank" so must PBS have a financial backing should there be a "run on credits". Everyone of us got free credits when we started this site, plus any credits that are purchased. If all of a sudden weird as it may seem (we'll get to the legalities of it in a minute) should all of us pull all our books off our shelves, and then demand at the same time to be able to order a book with the credits we have, SOMEONE has to get books for us to order. Guess who?

The financial laws of intangible assets of this country require that PBS back up all the credits that the give away or sell and be able to send out books for them. Well, they don't want to be sending those books out at less than it will cost them, so they factor in the cost of the avg book at a UBS, plus shipping supplies, and postage to come up with the cost of a credit. This is how much they then charge for those that the sell, and invest to back up the ones they give away.

Hope that helps you understand that it DOES cost PBS money when YOU send a book.

Good discussion above, but now, 15 years later, media mail often costs more than a credit, and an argument could be made that credits should go up in price.

Arleigh 

I love this site but I don't get how people are saying this site is free still'I pay $20 a year for a membership fee.Which is fine.Theres many books here I want but not enough credits to get them all and I don't have a bookstore here to get books to post anymore.When I lived in a big city I found tons to post and got alot of orders,now not so much.I stay more for the contact with friends I've made here and to post on the threads and I can find books cheaper online elsewhere and don't have to wait for them to maybe become available and yet that attitude is what makes people stop posting,then there are less a variety of books to choose from,if you can't find what you want you go elsewhere regardless of pricing.If you love books who cares thats its a bit more to mail,when you order a book someone else is paying for you so its a trade off.Keep it cheaper regardless and more people will use your service over others.

It's almost $5 to mail a single book now, and if you use printable postage there is a fee that makes it more than $5.  I think it's time to raise the minimum rate to buy credits to at least $4 and even then we're selling at a loss.   I use to be able to sell a few credits to make a deposit to my pbs account to cover postage which I stopped doing because at $3 it doesn't pay.  And with postage so high now, it's getting harder to make sense of the $20 membership fee.  PBS made a lot more sense when there was no yearly fee and I could mail a book for under $2.  Especially because the site goes down way too often!