Hazel picked up my calculator, put it to her ear, got a book from the shelf, and went to the window. Tom was on the porch just outside. So I figure she was Face timing him to show him the book.
I was very happy to read this. As you may know, I use my kindle strictly at bedtime for ease of holding the book. My heart belongs to print books, and I have bought a lot in the past year.
From the New York Times.
The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead
By ALEXANDRA ALTERSEPT. 22, 2015
Penguin Random House last year doubled the size of its distribution center in Crawfordsville, Ind., to speed up book distribution.
Credit
A J Mast for The New York Times
Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.
As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.
Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”
But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
Steve Bercu, co-owner of a bookstore in Austin, Tex., where 2015 sales are up 11 percent, and profits are the highest ever.
Credit
Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.
E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.
E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper.
The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.
“The fact that the digital side of the business has leveled off has worked to our advantage,” said Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. “It’s resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time.”
Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.
Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.
“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.
The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.
Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 percent.
Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day, and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.
“It’s a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold,” Mr. Dohle said.
At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Tex., sales are up nearly 11 percent this year over last, making 2015 the store’s most profitable year ever, said Steve Bercu, the co-owner. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilization of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random House’s so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.
“The e-book terror has kind of subsided,” he said.
Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.
“We’ve seen people coming back,” said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo. “They were reading more on their Kindle and now they’re not, or they’re reading both ways.”
Digital books have been around for decades, ever since publishers began experimenting with CD-ROMs, but they did not catch on with consumers until 2008, shortly after Amazon released the Kindle.
The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.
But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.
Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.
As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $13 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.
On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.
The tug of war between pixels and print almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the death of the digital publishing revolution. An appealing new device might come along. Already, a growing number of people are reading e-books on their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost $400).
It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar.
At Amazon, digital book sales have maintained their upward trajectory, according to Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle. Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more than a million titles, many of them from self-published authors.
Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.
“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”
I am on a bit of mission to do more cooking from my recipe boxes. This recipe has sat in the 'muffins and pancakes' box untried for 25 years. It is from a dear friend's neighbor who made them for us all those years ago. She called them:
Healthy Pancakes (Amy's)
mix together:
1/2 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup white flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2 T. sugar
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. baking powder
3/4 t. baking soda
beat lightly together and then stir into dry mixture:
1 egg
2 c. buttermilk
2 T. melted butter
I added some blueberries and raspberries.
Cook on a greased griddle.
These were great, and I won't wait another 25 years to make them! The recipe makes a lot of pancakes, plenty for Tom and I with enough batter left over for Matthew and Margaret to make pancakes for Hazel Nina.
You may go visit here to see what else is cooking this weekend.
In many ways, the poison was the personality in Agatha Christie’s stories—the element of surprise amid an otherwise reassuring collection of country-house clichés.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY POPPERFOTO/GETTY
In the course of her career, Agatha Christie killed hundreds of characters: some by drowning, some by stabbing, and one with a crowbar. But her preferred murder weapon was chemical, rather than physical. “Give me a decent bottle of poison,” she is supposed to have said, “and I’ll construct the perfect crime.”
Or, perhaps, the perfect murder mystery: as Kathryn Harkup demonstrates, inadvertently, in a new book, “A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie,” Christie’s fictions are profoundly shaped by the poisons that their characters skillfully employ. What’s more, those characters enjoy relatively unfettered access to a range of exotic toxins, in a way that a would-be murderer could only dream of today. One begins to suspect that, among the many factors that gave us Christie’s enormously popular novels, we must count the particular period for poisoning in which she lived.
Harkup is a chemist, as well as a Christie fan. Christie, she writes, “freely admitted to knowing nothing about ballistics,” but used poisons “with a high degree of accuracy.” Christie also used them far more frequently than any of her contemporaries. Her meticulous use of strychnine was even remarked upon in a review in the Pharmaceutical Journal, much to Christie’s delight.
Her expertise can be traced back to volunteer service in the local hospital dispensary during the First World War, during which time Christie trained as an apothecary’s assistant. She successfully passed her exams in 1917, after receiving private tuition from a local commercial pharmacist. Mr. P., as she referred to him, was a rather alarming character, whom Christie caught making a potentially fatal mistake while formulating suppositories, and who carried a lump of curare in his pocket at all times, because, he said, “it makes me feel powerful.”
Mr. P. went on to play a starring role in one of Christie’s later mysteries, “The Pale Horse,” and Christie’s firsthand experience in the delicate art of handling potentially deadly drugs became central to her books. In Christie’s fictional universe, as Joan Acocella has written for this magazine, emotional depth is forgone in favor of elaborate and entertaining puzzles. After all, as Acocella points out, “if she had given her characters any psychological definition, we could have solved the mystery,” and the addictive quality of Christie’s whodunit formula would have suffered as a result. The cold, calculating nature of murder by poisoning, as opposed to the violent passion implicit in a stabbing or strangulation, is precisely suited to propelling plots in which any one of the characters could be the culprit, all the way until the very end. In many ways, the poison was the personality in Christie’s stories—the element of surprise amid an otherwise reassuring collection of country-house clichés.
According to Harkup, when it came to poisons, “Christie invariably played with a straight bat”: no untraceable poisons, no implausible sourcing, and just three invented drugs, only one of which was used to kill. Harkup plays it equally straight, sticking to her own formula so closely as to risk tedium. After a promising introduction, readers are left to plod through the next fourteen chapters, each of which details, in the same order, the toxicology, availability, famous real-life cases, and Christie’s fictional use of arsenic, strychnine, cyanide, and eleven other poisons. Fortunately, interesting tidbits emerge: digitalis intoxication may have been responsible for van Gogh’s “yellow period”; eating phosphorus-laden match heads was a surprisingly common method of suicide in the nineteen-twenties; and arsenic was popular enough among murderers that its French nickname was poudre de succession, or “inheritance powder.”
More intriguingly, out of the somewhat mind-numbing accumulation of detail, it becomes possible to discern the ways in which chemistry, rather than character, drives Christie’s plots. It is the poison that provides the pacing, for example, in the Hercule Poirot mystery “Five Little Pigs,” in which the time it takes for a lethal dose of hemlock to take effect allows five potential murderers, all of whom have good cause to wish the unlucky Amyas Crale dead, the opportunity to strike. Again and again, the varying availability, symptoms, antidotes, and post-mortem detection methods of particular poisons shape both the actual crimes and Christie’s careful orchestration of red herrings and clues. Arsenic’s solubility in hot water, atropine’s bitter taste, even phosphorus’s propensity to endow its victims’ intestines with an eerie glow, not to mention “smoking-stool syndrome”—in each case, it is the poison’s strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies that structure the narrative and eventually allow Miss Marple, Poirot, or one of Christie’s other amateur detectives to solve the mystery.
Indeed, as the examples (and dead bodies) mount up, Christie’s rigorous rejection of character and motivation in favor of chemical agency comes to seem almost avant-garde. Meanwhile, as Harkup points out, while she favored cyanide, Christie was frequently esoteric in her choice of poisons. Hemlock, for example, had not been used in an intentional poisoning since Socrates’ day, according to Harkup. Ricin, which is deployed against four members of the same household in “The House of Lurking Death,” had no track record as a murder weapon at the time Agatha Christie was writing, Harkup says, despite being potent, untreatable, and easily consumed accidentally in the form ofcastor-oil seeds. “In many respects,” Harkup writes, Christie’s use of ricin “was years ahead of her time.” (Ricin had a brief moment of notoriety when the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London using a ricin-tipped umbrella, in 1978, but its current fame is owed mostly to Walter White, of “Breaking Bad,” who favored ricin as a means of disposing of anyone who got in his way.)
What’s most striking about Harkup’s exhaustive descriptions, however, is the portrait they draw of a culture awash in poisons. In early-twentieth-century Britain, patent tonics contained strychnine, opium could be bought over the counter without question, and no gardener’s shed was without a stock of potassium cyanide (for use as an insecticide). Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution had democratized arsenic: as a byproduct of smelting iron ore, arsenic trioxide was scraped out of chimneys in vast quantities. “Soon,” according to Harkup, “anyone and everyone could afford enough arsenic to dispatch an unwanted relative or inconvenient enemy.” The nineteen-twenties and thirties, when Agatha Christie began her career, are known as the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” in which a cohort of mostly British authors defined the standards of the genre. Seen through the lens of Harkup’s research, it seems equally to have been the golden age of poisons, after the first flowering of organic chemistry and before the stricter regulations that arrived after the Second World War. Never before or since, it seems, has the would-be murderer—or murder-mystery writer—been furnished with such a range of easily available toxins.
Indeed, Christie’s attention to detail left her open to the accusation that she offered a handbook for would-be murderers. Harkup recounts a 1977 case in France, in which Roland Roussel, a fifty-eight-year-old office worker, murdered his aunt using atropine eye drops. The gendarme who found a copy of the Miss Marple mystery “The Tuesday Club Murders” in Roussel’s apartment reportedly declared, “I’m not saying Roussel was inspired by the book, but we found it in his apartment with the relevant passages on poison underlined.”
At the same time, Christie’s precision when it came to poisons can apparently be credited with saving at least two lives. Harkup quotes a 1975 letter from a woman in South America who had raised justified suspicion that an acquaintance was being poisoned by his young wife: she wrote to Christie in thanks, concluding, “but of this I am quite, quite sure—had I not read ‘The Pale Horse’ and thus learned of the effects of thallium poisoning, X would not have survived.” Two years later, soon after Christie’s own death, a nurse with a taste for mysteries spotted the symptoms of thallium poisoning in a nineteen-month-old in Qatar. In their report, the child’s physicians acknowledged their indebtedness “to the late Agatha Christie for excellent and perceptive clinical descriptions, and to Nurse Maitland for keeping us up to date with the literature.”
You may have noticed that Mrs. Appleyard hasn't made an appearance here since April. I have thought about the book a few times over the summer, but just didn't have time to sit down with it. At least I thought that was the reason. However, I did read seven print books during those months, so I clearly made a choice to read them instead of Mrs. Appleyard's Year. Today, while Hazel Nina was napping, I thought I would pick it up and read May through August and write a little blog post called 'catching up with Mrs. Appleyard.'
I began the May entry, and I just wasn't interested. I skipped ahead a bit, and I still had the same feeling. I think that what I felt was witty in the earlier chapters became tedious later on - as if the author were trying too hard to be cute. Over the years, I have read and enjoyed a few Mrs. A. books, but this is clearly not one of them, so I'm saying adieu to her and giving the book to a library sale.
Yesterday we went to the fair -Tom and I, our kids, and their kids. It was heaven. I was so happy! It was very hot. Michael and Estée brought their little wagon which kept the sun off Hazel and Campbell.
Little Indy Thomas, who turned two months old, was asleep the whole time. Next year he can join the big kids in trying out all the four-wheelers and snow mobiles.
We were all set to take the kids on the merry-round but the rule was the child had to be 36 inches tall. It surprised me because years ago, I took my kids on the merry-go-round when they were very little. As it turned out, there was just one ride they could go on with a parent, a Thomas train.
Michael and Estée had taken the boys to another fair the day before, and Campbell Walker got to go down a slide with his daddy,
and ride the merry-go-round,
so maybe different amusement owners have different rules.
Margaret's first time at the fair - about 13 months old. Not only could she ride the merry-go-round but also that little car. I don't look too safe though, do I?
Michael's first fair came just days after he arrived from South Korea.
and by the next year - at 16 months, he was enjoying the merry-go-round.
We ran into the same man I mentioned in a 2012 posting. This spring we all lived in fear as he went through a horrible cancer operation, but he is well, healed, with no concerns now. I hadn’t seen him since, and I couldn’t stop hugging him and crying. We also ran into our neighbors who told of their grandsons whose ‘world has expanded beyond us now.’ One is in college and the other in high school. It’s an emotional thing for me, the fair. My fair. It is a marker of our life, our children’s lives, and now our grandchildren’s lives. Last year Matthew and Margaret brought Hazel Nina, and they were remarking on how different she is this year, and I was thinking how different Indy Thomas would be next year. ‘The seasons they go round and round.’ (Joni Mitchell's The Circle Game)
For this week's entry in Weekend Cooking, I made some muffins. I used to do an occasional posting called Muffin Monday (see Letter Topics on sidebar) but haven't done one for three years. I love muffins, and maybe will start doing this again.
As fall approaches, I needed to use up my frozen cranberries before the new ones hit the stores. I had some cream cheese in the fridge, and so did a search for cranberries and cream cheese. I found this recipe here and thought I’d try it. The muffins are delicious! Easy to make, lovely aroma while baking, and a great taste. I’ll make them again.
Cranberry Cream Cheese Muffins
1/2 cup softened butter
4 oz. softened cream cheese
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 eggs
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups fresh whole cranberries
1/4 cup coarse grain white sugar
Preheat oven to 350°F. Place paper or foil baking cups into 12 muffin pan cups. Set aside. (I greased pan instead of using baking cups)
Combine butter and cream cheese in bowl (I used my KitchenAid mixer) and beat at medium speed until well mixed.
Add sugar and vanilla and continue beating.
Beat in eggs.
In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Lower speed and mix in dry ingredients until just combined.
Stir in cranberries.
Evenly divide batter among prepared muffin cups.
Sprinkle coarse grain sugar over top of each muffin. (I didn't do this, and they were plenty sweet - though I may do it next time for that nice crunch on the top)
Bake 21-26 minutes until tops begin to brown on edges and toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. (What a odd baking time. I guess I would just say that mine baked about 25 minutes.)
Each time I do a post about What I Learned From TV, I’ll begin with the explanation from the first posting:
Now that my kids are grown, and Tom has retired, I’ve been able to go back to my natural sleep pattern which is to stay up late and get up late. Tom’s natural rhythm is just the opposite. So, he’s the lark and I’m the owl. And what this owl does in the late hours is watch television- not in the traditional way but through Hulu, Netflix, TunnelBear, and Acorn TV. Most of the shows are British, though I am a great fan of a few American television shows, and have been watching some from other countries now that we have TunnelBear. Some of these shows Tom will watch in the mornings, but some of them are all mine. So, when I hear a great quote from a show I know he’s not going to watch, I’ll leave him little post-it notes near the computer keyboard. I had a notion this morning to begin a new ‘letter topic’ called What I Learned From TV so I can put up some virtual post-its for you to read and, hopefully, enjoy. Some are funny, some are educational, some are wise.
Numerous studies have shown that profanity can be quite beneficial when used in moderation. Use of occasional profanity has been linked to increased circulation, elevated endorphins, and an overall sense of calmness.
