Shipping Costs

 Postage Prices
  I just received an email from AbeBooks suggesting some books I should read, based apparently on the titles I had already purchased. It was an interesting list, to me at least, because it was created from the types of titles I had purchased from them before.
   From the list of books I picked one, which is omitted from the screenshot above. I want you to focus on the costs, rather than my choice of books. You can see that the books costs about $12 US and AbeBooks provides a useful currency converter which reveals that I will have to pay about $16.50 in Canadian currency.
  If you are ordering books from AbeBooks, you should pay some attention to the shipping costs before you put them in the cart. In this case, it will cost me $100 US (about $140 CDN) to buy a used book which costs about $15 bucks. The book, by the way, is a used and small one, not for the coffee table, but it would have to travel all the way from Texas to Ontario. This has happened before and I have often spotted a cheap book that was too expensive to ship.
  This is not the fault of AbeBooks and I did find other copies of the same book from other places with much cheaper shipping prices and AbeBooks should not be blamed for the weakness of our currency. Just make sure to check before you check out.

Post Script:

   AbeBooks is not named for an "Abe", but because it began as Advanced Book Exchange in Victoria and still has a head office there, even though it is now owned by Amazon where things are often shipped very cheaply.

  Canadians should know that one can order from Canadian bookshops on AbeBooks to avoid the currency problem, although the shipping costs still are often hefty. Some sellers also offer free shipping to Canada, but in both cases the inventory will be much smaller. 
   

AbeBooks is invaluable, however, as a global 'bookstore' which provides access to local bookshops. You can, for example, find and search for books at Cardinal Books in Birr, just outside of London and then go and pick them up without spending on shipping. 

   

  

More Flotsam

    I noticed this headline - "Maersk Ship Loses 750 Containers Overboard in Pacific Ocean" in the Wall Street Journal (Jan 21.), where it was reported that it was "the latest in a series of weather-related accidents at sea affecting millions of dollars in cargo." Looking for additional details, I found them in The Maritime Executive on Jan. 22: " Maersk Boxship Loses 750 Containers Overboard in North Pacific,"

Heavy weather in the North Pacific is being blamed for the loss of containers aboard one of Maersk’s containerships. This is the third container loss incident recently reported in the Pacific.Maersk is saying that approximately 750 containers were lost overboard from the Maersk Essen, a 148,723 dwt vessel with a capacity of 13,100 TEU. The loss occurred on January 16, but the line did not supply details on the vessel’s location. There have been several other incidents in recent month also on the North Pacific. On November 30, the ultra-large containership ONE Apus lost approximately 1,800 containers overboard and damaged scores more during reports of severe weather approximately 1,600 nautical miles northwest of Hawaii.

What's a TEU?

Two forty-foot containers stacked on top of two twenty-foot containers. These four containers represent 6 TEU.

   It is basically a container that is usually 20' long and 8' high, but sometimes they are 40' long. 'TEU" = TWENTY-FOOT EQUIVALENT UNIT. The ship, ONE Apus, lost 1800 of them and you can see a video of the ship, with the remaining containers in disarray, in this YouTube video from the South China Morning Post. 

What Could Go Wrong?

   If a ship could lose 1800 containers, which was only a portion of its load, how many can the largest ship carry? At this time, the largest container ship is the MSC Gülsün which can carry up to 23,756 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) a time. To translate that number into one we consumers can understand, it can carry 8.35 million microwave ovens or 2.94 million washing machines.

Sources: 

There is a Wikipedia entry for TEU - Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit

If you are now intrigued see this article at iContainers.com - "What is TEU? Learn About Its History and Meaning. 

I did not do the math to find out how many microwave ovens could be carried, it was in this article:

"Boat‑lovers Can’t Contain Enthusiasm as MSC Gülsün arrives in UK," Tom Ball, The Times, Sept. 7, 2019. (The ship is 1, 312 feet long.)

For more about the garbage floating and, perhaps soon to be piling up in the Pacific, see my earlier post: Flotsam and Jetsam.  Or this one involving cattle. 

For another post about the Pacific, see this one about a paraplegic woman who attempted to row across it: Angela Madsen (RIP)