The postal rate changes that went into effect in the United States in May had an unexpected and unpleasant surprise—the cost of mailing our booklets increased dramatically. Postage costs were up more than 28 percent the first week the new rates were in effect. Some portions of our mailings are up over 80 percent. The biggest difference is that while previously postage was based almost entirely on weight, the new rates also factor in size. Anything larger than 11½ by 6¹/8 inches—called "flat rate"—costs almost 32 percent more than it did under the prior rates. Rates for items smaller than that—called "letter rate"—actually decreased 16 percent. To use a real-life example, the cost of mailing a copy of the Marriage and Family: The Missing Dimension booklet first class increased from 87 cents to $1.14. The cost of mailing a copy of Sunset to Sunset: God's Sabbath Rest decreased from 87 cents to 75 cents. The weights of the booklets are similar, but size now makes a dramatic difference in what it costs to mail them. Compounding the problem is the fact that our larger magazine-size booklets are generally our most popular. For example, seven of our 10 most-requested and most-printed booklets are the larger size. Even though a person may request several of our smaller booklets, if even one of the larger booklets in included, the package must be mailed at the higher rate. The change in postage rates factoring in package size came with only a few weeks' warning, leaving us little time to prepare and no time to reprint existing materials before the new rates went into effect. To mitigate the impact of this postage increase, we immediately began work on converting the larger-size booklets to the size of our smaller booklets, commonly called digest-size. However, since almost half of our booklets (16 of 33) are the larger size, it will take some time, perhaps a year, before our production staff is able to reformat all of them, especially since we have only limited windows of time to work on them in between our existing work on The Good News, Vertical Thought, advertising materials and other booklet reprints. Regrettably, these rate increases and the impact on our staff to reformat these booklets will likely prevent the production of any new booklets for the next year. Rate increases for our other publications—The Good News, Vertical Thought, World News and Prophecy and United News—are yet to be announced and are scheduled to go into effect in July.