Large blue clock with the word anticipation across the top

Anticipation (Or What to Expect When Launching a New Website During a Paper Shortage!)

By Tim Stookesberry Date: March 01, 2022 Tags: SUNY Press Team

Tim Stookesberry is the Director of SUNY Press 

I set my alarm for an early wake-up on February 1st so that I could be the very first customer to order a book from the brand-new SUNY Press website, scheduled to go live sometime in the wee hours of the morning. While my plans were thwarted by someone ordering from a different time zone, I was the third person to place an order – and, boy oh boy, I was far from the last…

To say that everyone at the Press is overwhelmed by the incredible outpouring of support we’ve received for our new website launch would be an understatement. In February, we received the same number of orders that we received in the first three months of last year! On behalf of everyone who works here, thank you for shopping at our new store.

I also wanted to let you all know that we are still fine-tuning the site to make it the best possible experience for our customers. We realize that you have lots of choices about where you buy books, and we’re hopeful that you’ll continue to make our website one of your first stops.

Having said that, we are currently experiencing some delays in our printing operation that may have an impact on how fast we can get you the books you’ve ordered from our website. For quite some time, SUNY Press has made the environmentally conscious decision to print most of our paperback titles on demand. The printer we use for that service on our website is currently working their way through a paper shortage. While this will be solved in the next few weeks, it means that orders are currently taking about one week to be processed from the time the order is placed.

These printing delays are not counted as part of the shipping options you will see in our shopping cart, so we wanted to make sure we made you aware of them now. We’ll let you know when we’re back to our 24–48-hour-turnaround time!

SUNY Press does use a different printing facility for the books we ship to many of our other online distribution partners, including Amazon. So if you’re in a hurry for your books, that might be a good option for you to consider.

For those of you who don’t mind a few extra days, please visit https://sunypress.edu/About/Ordering-Info for more information on what to expect when shopping on our website including finding out how to track your package. And as always, I love to hear from our customers so feel free to reach out to me directly at tim.stookesberry@sunypress.edu