I always weigh my books on my PB scale before I buy a Printable Postage wrapper.  Just now, I found that the book I need to mail was noted as 2 lbs. some high-odd ounces, when my scale said it was at  1 lb. some odd ounces.

I weighed it three times just to make sure, and finally changed the weight amount in the postage data information.  To be honest, the book is large, but it's not anywhere near three pounds originally stated.  I know all scales are different, but I'm glad I caught mine.  :)  Watching pennies means getting to mail more books to people, right?

I change those all the time. I think whatever number comes up must be whatever the last person put in there and is not necessarily the information from the book data information. I sometimes change them for example if I'm sending one book but have a freebie attached, I'll weigh the two books together and need to print the right amt of postage. So the next person who comes along might have a postage info that said twice what it really weighs and will need to change it.

I just changed one that said it weighed 2.5 lbs but it was actually under a pound!

Cheryl

Hi Lisa Marie - May I suggest you change the weight in the book data.  Go to the book description page and to the right you will see a button for more options.  Click on it and a drop down menu appears select edit data.  You can edit the weight PBS has in the system. It needs to be approved so at the top - there is a section to describe edits - let them know you weighed the book and it isn't what it listed.  It takes 24-48 hours to process.  This way others printing postage for this book will have the correct weight.   Good Luck

What Jubead said , and be sure you are inputting the book weight, rather than the wrapped book weight.  (The software automatically adds a bit to allow for the weight of shipping materials.)

I wouldn't always count on the change happening within a couple days, sometimes we get backlogged if we have several approvers offline at the same time during a week, then it takes a bit to get caught up too :)

I wish the weight displayed in oz.  I always have a hard time converting oz into pound fractions. Like .5 or .33 or whatever of a pound.  I hope I've been doing it right.

If you divide the ounces by 16, you get the right number for pounds.

So 4 ounces is 4/16 or .25 pounds.  For the hard ones, I use the calculator on my computer.

You definitely have to be careful. I wrapped one of my books to mail and noted that the PBS label said the postage to send this book by Media Mail was $4.33. (I guess I had First Class postage on the brain, so it didn't click immediately as being wrong.) Then I remembered that the last time I mailed a book about the same size (previous book in the same series -- same rough number of pages) the postage was about $2.33 or $2.38 (don't remember the exact rate).

When I went to the APC to mail it, I weighed the package, and it was somewhere between 12 and 13 oz. -- about $2.33 or $2.38, so I bought the label and sent it on its way. Now, at home, I checked PBS's weight for the book and it was listed as being over 5 LBS.!!!!!!! Yikes!

ETA: I just submitted a book edit for this one. It was way, way, way off!

New ETA: I was e-mailed back soon after by the team and a change is a-coming.

I still think that the last weight someone put into the postage calculator is what comes up when you mail a book, NOT what is listed on the book data information. This morning I printed a label where the weight of the book was listed as being 9.6 oz and it was a mass market paperback, not overly thick, so I knew that was wrong. I double checked with my scale, and sure enough, the book only weighed 5.4 oz.

Just for kicks, I opened up another window, brought up the book and clicked on "edit book data" and in the frame for the weight, it said .3 lbs, which would make approx the actual weight of the book. Which is why I'm not sure that it's necessary to actually the edit the data of the book everytime you get an inaccurate weight on the postage calculator. Definitely, if it's way off, check the book data, but I think what happened is probably the last time someone sent this book, they added in a freebie which brought the weight up to what was listed on the postage calc, and that "sticks" for the next person. It doesn't (or didn't in this case anyway) change the actual book data.

Cheryl

A lot of the time the weights that come up as estimated by PBS are wrong, sometimes WAY OFF!  One problem I think that I have noted is that sometimes you can change the weight in the "edit" area and it doesn't stay changed, even if there is plenty of time for the system to catch up.  This is why I always weigh all of my shipments and trust my scale much more than PBS's advise/estimate.

Just double-checked Amazon.com and saw that they have the book listed at 5 pounds, too! I know my kitchen scale isn't perfect, but it is digital and is reasonably accurate with a few tenths of an ounce. And the scale at the APC showed it to be 12.40 ounces WRAPPED!!! So 5 pounds is definitely WAY off.

ETA: I haven't found that old weights stick when entered by someone else on the label page (when including a freebie or something). Sometimes the inaccurate weights are coming from an outside source, like in my case, from Amazon. (I don't know how they figured the shipping weight of a 384-page paperback is 5 pounds. They have the preceding book in the series (same number of pages) listed as 12.8 ounces -- way, way closer to what I got and an entirely reasonable margin of error.