I thought the senders were suppose to reply within 48 hours if book could be sent. I am still waiting for a response (second time I requested). Waited over a week for response if book was accepted or mailed. Nothing. Cancelled and requested (I thought) from a different member. Still waiting for reply again. I want to change request to the hard cover copy instead. Then maybe I will get a response. Very flusterated with this member. If they are doing that, then they need to be eliminated from Paperbackswap. That's not fair to other members.

If you waited over a week for a response, then your request had already rolled over (to the next person who has the book posted) at least once.

As Tibben pointed out, if you cancel a request, then re-order the same ISBN, you are just re-ordering from the same member, and have reset the five day till auto rollover clock.

If a member does not reply to a request, then when the reuqest rollover to the next member, the book is removed from the member bookshelf. According to lore, if this happens too many times, it will trigger some type of warning from TPTB.

If you are in a hurry, you could order two different ISBN's, to see which receives the first response, but, you do risk actually receiving both copies, if both members reply and print the label within a close timeframe.

Here is a list of deadlines associated with the PBS swapping process:

• A sender has 5 days* to respond to a request.
  • After accepting a request by clicking "I can mail in the next 2 days", a sender has 5 days to mark the book mailed. The deadline is at the end of the fifth day.
   
  • After accepting a request by clicking "I can mail later" and choosing an alternate mailing date, a sender has 2 days beyond the alternate mailing date to mark the book mailed. The deadline is at the end of the second day.
• A requestor has 48 hours to respond to an offer of a book from her Wish List.
• A book has 26 days from the "mailed" date to get to its destination within the contiguous US before it is declared "lost in the mail" at PBS.
• A book sent from or to outside the contiguous US (AK, HI, GU, VI, PR, APO/FPO/DPO, etc)  has 35 days from the "mailed' date to get to its destination.

 *The PBS system works on calendar --not business-- days. Members need to keep postal holidays and their own schedules in mind when accepting a request and choosing the mail-by date.

PBS is not the place to get a book if you need it quickly.  Even if someone mails the same day that you request, a book can still take a month to get to you.  You have to be patient when getting books from PBS. Waiting the full 5 days to accept a request is perfectly fair because it's allowed in the rules. Not everyone has the time to mail immediately or even has daily computer access.

Ordered this last time on July 25th. No response again from sender/member. Checked waiting folder, reset to August 5th. System will not let me order another ISB number, multiple copies. I guess I will wait another couple days then buy the book from Amazon. I sure will not post it here. What a shame.

There is nothing in the system that would stop you from ordering another ISBN.  You can't order multiple of the same ISBN in the system unless you are a GOld Key member, but you should be able to order as many different ISBNs as you want.

When the date changed to August 5th, your order was passed to a new sender.  You can follow the details of this in your credit registry, which is on the yellow bar on your main My Account page.  Because of the five-day deadline, I'm guessing that you'll find that the first sender didn't respond and your order was passed on to a new sender.  S/he didn't respond by the deadline, and it's now on its third sender.

I know this is frustrating, but a bright side is that you are helping to weed out inactive accounts.  When a member doesn't respond, the book is removed from his bookshelf.  If a member doesn't respond to consecutive orders or offers, his account is place hold.  Normally my experience here is that the first person to get my order responds and mails me the book.  But sometimes if there are a lot of copies of an ISBN posted here, the books that have finally made it to the top of the sending line were posted long ago by members who are no longer active.  Maybe that's what you're running into.  So sorry!

I ordered the hard cover. There was only 1 paperback copy. I didn't care if it was hard cover or paperback. I wanted to read the book. nThis one hopefully gets mailed. Account does say label printed... Who knows, I'll wait 10 days to see if mailed. If not, on to Amazon.

I've only had a request time out once and there was no other copy in the system, disappointing but it happens. As others have said, PBS isn't the place for "I need it now" book swapping. I usually wait two to four days before answering requests because I only go to the post office once a week and if I accept the request too soon, I might not make the mailing deadline. 

If the label is printed there should be a "will mail by" date next to it. It won't take ten days. 

Dawn, the fact that they printed the label is a VERY good sign.  I think this time's the charm!

And it's marked shipped also! Yippee! Should have ordered the hardcover the first time after a week. Anticipating arrival!!!!