Shipping Books with an M Bag

Paula,
Can you let me know around how much they charged you to ship the M bags when you turn them in? We're still working on ours and I would like to get a ballpark figure. I understand they charge based on weight.
Thanks so much!

Sure thing but according to the USPS info, it'll be $.90/pound. So, if I pack an M-bag to capacity, it should be $59.40/bag. I'll let you know what the final tally is-how many books per bag, weight per bag, and cost per bag.

When I moved over a year and a half ago I was told by my local post office I could not use a box inside an M bag, everything had to be wrapped individually so you could still tell it was books.  I had read somewhere to use cling film to tightly wrap each book so it would survive the trip but several of my books got rather badly battered. For the paperback books I didn't mind so much but for some of my hard back books I am sorry I used the M bag and should have waited and carried them over in a suitcase on subsequent trips or something.

Of all the things I had to leave behind when I moved over,  books are the things I think I miss the most. 

A word of caution....My wife shipped a load of books via an M bag from the Boston area. The books were securely in a box, taped up. A LOT of them were missing when it finally arrived, and as there is no way of telling whether the USPS, shipping company, or Royal Mail was responsible, there was nothing we could do. Don't send anything you couldn't stand to lose.

That's odd Missy I was never told not to use boxes inside the M bag (shipping from Southampton in western MA last summer), and nothing was missing from any of my bags (I think I sent five? I can't remember.)  Has anyone else had problems with books missing as Cohoman did?

I used mBags when we moved to London and never had a problem. I placed the books inside two small cardboard boxes, and put the boxes inside the bag (not individually wrapped like someone above was told to do!) The bag arrived within 3 weeks straight to our front door (unlike any of our parcels, which always seem to get delivered to Parcel Force)

This was  a small post office in a rural-ish area outside Atlanta. They had one employee that even knew what an M bag was and how to fill it/ apply the proper tags to it. I'm not saying it is correct, that's just what I was told and how I shipped mine and wasn't best pleased with how they arrived. If you can use a box I'd say go for it. Otherwise it's shipper beware.

Just mailed three M bags from Atlanta to Lichfield UK for the price of $131.40. Our heaviest bag weighed 52 lbs., so not bad for the amount we sent. FYI....The postal worker said our books could not be in boxes, so we had to take them all out and reload them into the bags. I pressed him, as I had read on here that the books can take a beating. He said we *could* keep them in the boxes but that would hold things up in customs quite a bit. So we chanced it and removed them...hoping for the best. Good luck to everyone else out there moving. We've only got one more box to send and we're done! 

i've got 5 m-bags so far, with one more to fill.  the average weight of each is about 40 lbs, but i'm thinking i'm gonna have to break them down into more bags--i can't really lift the buggers!

Just mailed three M bags from Atlanta to Lichfield UK for the price of $131.40. Our heaviest bag weighed 52 lbs., so not bad for the amount we sent. FYI....The postal worker said our books could not be in boxes, so we had to take them all out and reload them into the bags. I pressed him, as I had read on here that the books can take a beating. He said we *could* keep them in the boxes but that would hold things up in customs quite a bit. So we chanced it and removed them...hoping for the best. Good luck to everyone else out there moving. We've only got one more box to send and we're done! 

I don't think mine got held up in customs at all - and they were all boxed inside the M-bags.  Weird!

 Its funny how different places say different stuff. I went to one Post Office in Dallas to get the bags and they said they could not be in boxes. So I spent all this time bubble wrapping them and I took the bag to a different Post Office to mail and they said it had to be in one big box and then placed inside the M bag. They said customs would not accept them individual like that and would return them back to the US.