Two for the weekend

A twofer today:

1. In cleaning out the attic these last few weeks, the Lady Friend and I discovered several boxes of new, uncirculated copies of my nonfiction books Flight of the Gin Fizz, Zephyr and What's That Pig Outdoors? Most are hardcover, a few are paperbacks and some are in Dutch and German.

When initial sales declined to the point at which the publishers decided to remainder the remaining copies, I bought a few boxes for what, I don't know, some vague idea of posterity. They've just been gathering dust all these years.

And so they're all for sale, along with a custom personal inscription. If you're interested, write me at author@henrykisor.com.

2. For the last couple of weeks the New York Times has been publishing a cool new blog, Schott's Vocab, dedicated to clever and sometimes just off-the-wall neologisms. Those are newly coined words that have never before existed and may have no real reason to do so, but in a few cases just might stick around and become part of our collective vocabulary.

For instance, twitturgy, or religious tweeting on Twitter. Instead of 5,000-word Sunday stemwinder sermons, pastors can issue up-to-140-words tweets such as:

Move into my neighborhood, God. Come sing in these suburban streets. Love the loveless. Laugh with the lonely. Spray the walls into beauty.

Ben Schott, a Londoner, writes the blog with the dry English humor he has infused into his celebrated miscellanies and almanacs, those arbitrary, anarchic and addictive book-length collections of facts, factoids, lists and charts for trivia hounds. I'm hooked.

Mene, mene tekel e-upharsin

Behold the e-writing on the wall.

1. Earlier this month, Amazon.com and Apple joined forces to make Amazon.com's 240,000 Kindle e-books downloadable to the iPhone and iPod Touch. This was huge. The enormous user base for those devices is eagerly snapping up the Kindle material as well as e-books in other reader formats.

2. Shortly afterward, Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise, another e-book retailer, so that the book chain can compete with Amazon.com and its Kindle. Just the other day Fictionwise announced a free e-book reader application for the Blackberry Curve, Storm, Pearl and Bold. Reportedly Blackberry is working on new wireless devices with larger screens optimized for e-book reading.

3. A few days ago Google and Sony announced that Google’s library of more than 600,000 public-domain e-books would now be available for free on the Sony Reader in Sony's ePub format. Sony also lowered the price of its flagship PRS-700 e-book reader to $350, compared to Amazon.com's $359 Kindle.

4. Amid the scores of university presses that suddenly have found themselves in a financial bind -- one, the University of Utah Press, may fold -- the University of Michigan Press is going to e-books in a big way. It publishes about 120 books a year, half of them slow-selling scholarly monographs important to academics but not to the public. It will now bring out most of these monographs as e-books, some of them available as print-on-demand works. UMP will save buckets of money this way.

5. Last week HarperCollins, one of the country's biggest book publishers, announced that it would no longer issue expensive printed catalogs of its wares but instead send them to the book trade as e-catalogs. HC will save bathtubs of money this way.

6. For a year or so several publishers have been sending e-manuscripts of their books to sales forces rather than expensive bound galleys, also called "advance reading copies." From all indications, the sales people love reading manuscripts on their Sony Readers, partly because they don't have to hump scores of copies of books home in bulging briefcases. It may not be long before some (but not all) publishers start issuing new manuscripts from their own web sites as e-books as well as printed ones, bypassing bookstores and independent online retailers. Publishers will save swimming pools of money this way.

Let's face it: the e-book is not only here to stay but also is beginning to muscle its way to the forefront of the publishing industry. Within the next few years the majority of book buyers very likely will be reading more books on electronic devices than on paper.

Does this mean that the printed book is a thing of the past? Not at all. Older readers who grew up loving printed books will keep on buying them, perhaps in smaller numbers as the recession deepens. Illustrated art books won't go away any time soon, although larger and sharper computer monitors down the road will bring Manets and Renoirs and Ansel Adamses to new art lovers. Libraries will keep on acquiring and circulating printed books; as the technological state of the art stands, it will be difficult for them to provide copyrighted e-books in proprietary formats without piracy concerns -- they'd just be too easy to steal.

Get ready for a sea change in your reading life.

MARCH 27: Fujitsu is launching a new e-book reading device to compete with Sony and Amazon.com, according to Publishers Weekly . . . and the "FLEPia" will cost an initial $1,000 when it reaches buyers in Japan. Oy, even if it's in color.

Ain't it the truth?

Bill, recently retired, is sitting on the sofa.

His wife, Linda, adjusting to his constant presence, tries to be diplomatic.

"What are you doing today?" she asks brightly.

"Nothing," he replies.

"Didn't you do that yesterday," she snaps.

Bill looks at her and smiles.

"I wasn't finished," he says.

With thanks to Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times

St. Vinnie's needs YOU

Times are tough -- tougher than usual -- up in Ontonagon County, the Upper Michigan locale that is the prototype for the rugged and remote Porcupine County in my mystery novels.

Making a living has always been difficult there. Back in 2007 when everyone elsewhere seemed to be enjoying the late bubble, 11.8 per cent of the Ontonagon population lived below the poverty line, and many of the rest just above it. Last November the county's largest employer, the Smurfit-Stone paper mill, shut down for lack of demand and soon filed for bankruptcy.

Some 150 mill workers were laid off and countless more in supporting businesses, such as pulpwood loggers, also lost their livelihood. Two months ago the unemployment rate in Ontonagon County surpassed 17 per cent and doubtless now is pushing 20 per cent.

And the winter has been one of the coldest and snowiest in decades.

Ontonagon County government is so broke that it doesn't have the resources, except for occasional grants, to serve those who are down on their luck. Plugging the gap falls to the local chapter of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the Catholic Church's international charity organization.

In Ontonagon the public face of St. Vinnie's, as it is called everywhere, is an old supermarket converted into a big thrift store full of cast-off but still usable clothes, furniture, dishes, pots and pans, books and toys. Even in better times it serves the town as a kind of Wal-Mart of secondhand goods, and everyone not only donates stuff to it but also shops there.

Behind the scenes St. Vinnie's keeps people alive. Its financial office helps pay their utility bills. Its modest food pantry provides staples for survival.

St. Vinnie's is so important to Ontonagon that a couple of years ago, when someone broke into the store and stole the meager till, $1,000, the entire town issued a collective gasp. Stealing from St. Vinnie's? Stealing from the poor? What kind of moral imbecile would do such a thing?

A few days later a local bank presented a check for the entire missing amount to the director of St. Vincent's, and the town breathed a sigh of relief. Kids would still have stout boots and warm coats for winter. Shut-ins would still have their 10-cent paperbacks to stave off loneliness. People could still replace broken crockery with gently used cups and plates.

St. Vinnie's may be nominally a Catholic organization, but it is so effective and efficient at ministering to everybody, whatever their creed, that the local Protestant churches hold fund-raisers for it and pass along the proceeds.

Now St. Vinnie's is stretched ever tighter. It needs help, a lot of it.

A friend of mine who is a fellow Summer Person in Ontonagon has been putting the arm on other seasonal residents to contribute to St. Vinnie's efforts for the destitute. The money is helping, but so much more is needed.

And so I am putting the arm on you -- that's you at your expensive computer -- to help out, too. You're lucky to have an income when so many Americans are losing theirs.

Send your check to:

St. Vincent de Paul
205 Quartz Street
Ontonagon, MI 49953

If you like, specify where you'd like the money to go -- helping with utilities, the food pantry, or maybe where it can be best used.

Or if you'd rather scatter your beneficence closer to home, look up your local St. Vincent's, Salvation Army or other charity.

Doing good will make you feel good. And it's tax deductible.

Driving an airplane

On March 5 the Terrafugia Transition (can you say that fast ten times?) flew for the first time. It's the latest in a long line of dreams about a practical flying automobile. Whether it will bear fruit is another matter. Here, from the aviation website Avweb.com, is a video of its first flight:



The Transition is actually a "roadable airplane," not a true flying car. The idea is to keep it in your garage and then drive it out to the airport (the designer says it's street legal) for takeoff and landing. Just try that on I-94 during rush hour, however.

What makes it different from past flying-car concepts is the wings. They fold onto the car like a bird's. Earlier designs had detachable wings, such as that of the 1949 Aerocar, of which only six examples ever were built:



The dream of a flying car was born long, long ago. Sometime in the early 1920s a retired doctor named George Spratt, who had worked with the Wright brothers, designed and flew such a machine, and a film of it flying is here.

Frankly, car-airplane hybrids have traditionally made lousy airplanes and lousy cars, and I doubt the Terrafugia Transition is going to be any different. Full marks, however, to its designer for the audacity of his state-of-the-art dreams.

Yak

One of the nice things about going flying in the spring is spotting the season's first rare airplane among the antiques or former warbirds that had been hangared all winter. On the first pleasant Sunday in March, their owners often roll them out into the sun to preen and shake their feathers, getting ready for summer air shows.

Yesterday, shortly after rolling the hangar door down on my little Cessna 150 at Westosha Airport in Wilmot, Wisconsin, I spotted this colorful Yakovlev Yak-52, an aerobatic trainer that introduced many fledgling Red Air Force pilots to combat maneuvers beginning in 1976. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, scores of surplus Yaks were exported to the United States and sold for a song, as they still are (a typical price is $50,000, actually quite low as airplanes go). They're not at all uncommon in American skies, especially at aerobatic contests, but at country airports they're still rare enough to turn heads.

This Yak-52 -- apparently newly painted in her original colors -- looks a little like a mantis on steroids with that long and skinny landing gear, necessary for the big paddle-blade propeller to clear the ground. Her pilot had just started the engine in a huge cloud of exhaust, nearly blown away at the time I snapped the photo. The propeller's whirling briskly, but the camera stopped it with a 1/4000 sec. shutter speed.

Ta-pocketa-pocketa . . .

The e-book vs. the tree-book, continued

Reading an e-book on an iPod Touch isn't what I expected.

Absorbing text from that tiny three-and-a-half-inch screen is easier and more restful than I at first thought it would be. In an experiment yesterday morning I spent nearly an hour reading a Michael Connelly novel with Amazon.com's free Kindle e-reader software and actually lost track of time without suffering from eyestrain. It was even a pleasant experience for this 68-year-old senior citizen.

So am I going to forsake the printed book? Of course not.

The iPod Touch needs to be recharged every night -- more often if it's used for the Internet. Its battery will last for only about three hours of Webcrawling, or six to eight hours for e-reading. One needs to be close to a 110 volt outlet.

A printed book, we all know, needs no electricity and will keep working even when dropped on a concrete floor. It's not particularly attractive to thieves; you can leave one on your beach blanket while going for a dip. And if it does get stolen or lost, you're out only seven to twenty-five bucks -- less if the book's old or borrowed.

An iPod Touch costs $229 plus tax. Losing one would be painful.

But it's pocketable where even a mass-market paperback isn't. It's unobtrusive. You can read it in the dark. You can read it surreptitiously in church during a long and boring sermon. You can read it scrunched up against other standees on the bus.

There are other advantages. On Amazon.com, current Kindle best sellers cost less than half the price of a printed book. If you use Stanza, another e-reader program, you can download and read free classics from Gutenberg.org. Then there's eReader, whose book prices are similar to Kindle's, but with a much fancier interface that allows you to change background and text colors as well as highlight text to save as notes.

In my view, this new electronic wave will not replace the printed book. Can you imagine trying to read an oversized art or photography book on a small screen? Can you imagine bespectacled Baby Boomers migrating in large numbers to a new technology in the middle of a depression when books are available for free at the library?

I suspect, however, that as time goes on e-books will cut deeply into sales of tree-books, and that publishers will have to adjust their business plans to deal with that. (Barnes & Noble has beheld the handwriting on the electronic wall and just last week acquired Fictionwise, the parent company of eReader.)

E-reading is another means of appreciating literature -- and it's a remarkably convenient one.