Japanese model railroad magazines

[John P Boogerd]

Is there any place I can get TMS Hobby of Model Railroading magazine other than Hobby Search?  Their price of about $9.00 is very reasonable but their postage is really expensive.  

[bill937ca]

Generally all Japanese magazines are heavy by comparison with North American publications. Each issue is ike a catalog or book in weight, hence the shipping.

 

[katoftw]

That is what a 5-6mm thick mags costs to send internationally. The 2-3mm thick western euro, US or AUS ones way a lot less.

 

I order mags from hs only when combined with other purchases.

Edited January 12, 2020 by katoftw

[cteno4]

It’s going to be this price from all Japanese sellers. Mokei imports in the us use to bring over catalogs and a few rail/hobby magazines in their container shipments to avoid the large shipping costs, so we could get them here in the states with very inexpensive media mail, but sadly he has passed and biz gone. Bob also was just starting to do this at BT trains in Seattle before he passed as well. This is the only way to avoid the shipping of heavy publications like this even with sal as they are printed (like most of Japanese publishing) on very nice heavier stock coated paper and usually more pages than in other places in the world these days for magazines.

 

amazon.co.jp use to have a flat fee for the shipping of the first book (quite high) but then 300yen each after that on an order so bundling a bunch of order could bring the price down a lot (we did some orders here of like 20 books and the DHL guy hated me). Now it’s per book weight pretty much, but amazon’s dhl prices are quite near Sal prices many times and way better than EMS. Above about 1.5kg and the Sal rates soar and go past ems near 2kg, so if you buy a few mags at most places you end up with ems rates.

 

jeff

[John P Boogerd]

Thanks to all of you. I now see it’s not so bad after all.