The PBS’s new membership scheme will enable students to get a free membership by enrolling online and sending a scanned proof of student identity. They’ll be able to log in and browse the online quarterly Bulletin available in the members’ area of the new site, and order books with their 25% members’ discount.

Student members will be alerted to the new Bulletin and will handle their membership by email. The PBS hopes they will welcome the simplicity of access and use that this new membership offers, as well as the fact that it’s free. The organisation will develop its new membership by offering lists of set texts and other tailored material for the student pages, and will provide a discussion forum online.

The PBS

The launch of the new, rebranded PBS site has enabled the PBS to recruit members and make it easy for existing members to renew their membership online.  The organisation hopes to widen its recruitment to younger, more web-savvy groups and also to recruit more widely internationally. The new site will enable the PBS to support and promote its other projects and prizes, which include the T S Eliot Prize, with the announcement of the shortlist and its new reading groups’ scheme on 21 October.  

The PBS has also just launched a new niche poetry bookshop, the only one of its kind in the world, which will sell all the 90,000 poetry books and CDs available in the UK, including all the poetry titles in print and the Poetry Archive CDs.

Both sites will offer a constantly-updated stream of news, articles, poems, reviews, events and a mass of other poetry-related material.