Hi Mingsu,
Sounds like your tape was shipped in the same batch as Zhou Bin's, but may be traveling by a different method of shipment. We have chosen our shippers for reliability and cost effectiveness over the quickest shipping speed.
We are working very hard to get caught up with the folks who have subscribed after the initial rush of subscriptions. The tapes are made to order and we have to do catch up runs between the regular production runs. Making one album takes something on the order of 3 hours between reel assembly, engraving, recording, packaging and printing of the artwork. To do all the albums for the current number of subscriptions will take something on the order of 3000 hours+, which is one and a half years' worth of full time manhours.
Crazy things can happen that can create some delays. For example, there are no more new stock low torque 7" plastic reels left on the planet - we used them all. So we have had to switch to low torque 5" reels for the next run of alignment tapes. While I should be drumming up sales for Bottlehead today I am instead redesigning artwork for the labels that I already did once a few months ago so we can get more alignment tapes out. Even though the price of the albums may seem high, we're all working our day jobs to pay our bills while we reinvest the money we receive from subscribers to improve the production flow by hiring help and hopefully soon acquiring more equipment as well. Hopefully our subscribers' enthusiasm will continue to grow as we expand the catalog and we will also grow to have a more efficient facility in the next year.
Oh and Ben, thanks for your subscription. You're no longer quite the last one to order, we have received another subscription or two in the last few days.
