For a long time now, the book that Jason et al. wrote, Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review, has been available for free on our web site.  It was free, that is, if you lived in the United States.  For addresses outside the United States, we charged a fee to cover the cost of additional postage and handling.

Back in February of 2009 the cost of "additional postage and handling" changed dramatically because of modifications to postal rates and customs requirements, so we stopped shipping books outside the United States.

That was a bummer.  While most of the requests for the book were for US addresses, we did get a fair number from outside the US, in particular from Canada.

A couple of months ago I began exploring other options for shipping books to non-US addresses.  I'm happy to announce that we are now able to take book requests from a limited number of countries outside the United States.  The available countries are in the Country list on this page.  And we'll cover the postage and handling - the fee is gone. 

Why just a limited number of countries?  Two reasons, one of them permanent and the other temporary.

The permanent reason is that the cost of postage to some countries is still too high for us to absorb.  The temporary reason is: I have not had time yet to add in all the countries for which we can afford to cover the postage and handling.  But I'm working on it!  I've now got all the EU countries and some others as well, so I'm making progress. 

I started all of this by adding Canada.  One of the first orders came from Mathieu Longtin so I sent him an email.  He verified that he had received the book. 

As evidence that the book did make it to Canada he kindly took a photo of his copy, posed with a bottle of Boréale, a regional beer from Montreal.  Just for good measure, he placed another Canadian icon in the photo: a hockey puck.  :-)

Many thanks to all the nice folks at International Mail Service, who helped make this possible.