It was 5 years ago!
The Approval Books platform is now 5 years old. 13472 Books old, as of this very moment, in just 5 years. As a =reminder, it was introduced on 27 Dec. 2013 at 06:23:57pm

I must say that in its current form it is quite different than when we originally conceived it, but it does seem to fill a huge need. While it was conceived as a tool for collectors at SOR to offer their duplicates, mostly lower valued ones, it did find a helpful audience with sellers who preferred it as a platform to sell their lower valued stamps than the list and auction one by one tools offered at commercial sites.
And with buyers, especially since shipping and other charges are always reasonable here, and choices seem ever growing in range and variety and stamp quality.

And the quality of most books has improved significantly over the past 5 years.

If you run some conservative estimates, over a million stamps changed hand and over 2 million stamps got listed in Approval Books.

For those who wish to look back:

https://stamporama.com/discboard/disc_main.php?action=20&id=7928#52410
27 Dec 2013
06:23:57pm

Kinda fun to look back at the early days.

rrr...

PS: On a side note, I have listed many books since the beginning (don't have a count..but over a couple of hundreds, but I will take an extended break in the first half of 2019, work on my collections, and maybe put together more Approval Books for the last part of 2019. I will disable all current books as of Jan 1, 2019.