Logical Expressions Blog

As I've become involved in publishing, I've read countless statistics about how the number of books being printed rises every year. Partly the number is increasing because of new technology like short-run "print on demand" options, which make it a lot less expensive for people to publish books.

The bad news is that according to a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, fewer people actually read. Apparently, 1 in 4 adults read NO books last year.

One in Four Read No Books Last Year

I have wondered for a while if readers are a dying breed. Realistically, my husband and I are some of the only people I know who actually read as a form of recreation/relaxation. When we're on vacation, I often go through more than one book/day.

When we went to Hawaii last spring, we were thrilled to discover that the state lets non-residents get a library card. It's not like we don't do anything else, but our evenings are often spent happily reading. Sure, we see the sights, but we definitely get a lot of books read too.

Even when we're not on vacation, we read a lot. I have about 30 books next to my side of the bed that I'll be donating to the Sandpoint Friends of the Library soon. (Many of them are books that I got at one of their books sales, so it seems fitting that they should go back.)

In fact, it occurred to me not too long ago, that you kow you read a lot when you are browsing the fiction stacks at the library and realize you have read books by a large percentage of the authors on the shelves.

Anyway, the fact that fewer people are reading is depressing to me both as a publisher and a human being. Reading requires intelligence, imagination, and thought -- three things that are not appreciated or encountered as often as they should be.

I love my cats, but this news article came as no surprise to me:

Feline Memories Found to Be Fleeting

A new study measured how long cats can remember information. The answer is 10 minutes.

Case in point: yesterday, my cat Troi was sitting staring at the baseboard that runs along the bottom of our living room wall. Apparently a bug had run under there at some point. She did seem to remember why she was there for a while and was looking quite attentive.

Until she started falling asleep that is. I guess it's easy to forget stuff, when you have to sleep 16-20 hours a day.

In other feline news, I have finished Happy Tabby: Develop a Great Relationship with Your Adopted Cat or Kitten. It's the "cat book" that corresponds to our "dog book" Happy Hound. Once I get my LCCN number from the Library of Congress, Happy Tabby is off to the printer!

Last Friday, I sent out the last regular issue of our Logical Tips newsletter. I got a lot of really nice emails from readers thanking me for all the tips over the years.

Since it's summertime and lots of people are on vacation, I thought I'd also post a note here to let subscribers know that you won't be getting a Logical Tips email in your inbox today. This page explains the change and future plans.

However as I said, we are starting up a new newsletter in September. So if you want to keep hearing from us, please check out our new Publishize newsletter.

When we stopped doing the print version of Computor Companion magazine, I got calls and emails for years from people who wanted it to come back as a print magazine. (Note that we have continued to publish it online reasonably consistently since 1999.)

With Logical Tips we're going to do the reverse. It's going from online to print. And I promise to send out an email to all subscribers when the books are available. There are so MANY tips, we are actually compiling them into four books. Since Logical Tips was published for seven years, I'm currently in the process of updating some of the older tips to Windows XP and Office 2003.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm not upgrading to Vista or Office 2007. I'm jumping off the upgrade bandwagon, at least for the time being. I figure I'm not the only person who is waiting a while to upgrade, so the Logical Tips books may be useful to people for some time to come.

The other day I mailed out a book the way I've been mailing them for quite some time. I weighed it, put on stamps for the appropriate postage, and put it in an outgoing mail box.

However, much to my dismay, our letter carrier refused to pick it up and plastered a little note from the USPS on it. In a move that has received little notice, as of July 30, the post office now won't let you mail anything over 13 ounces just by putting stamps on it. So I drove my book down to the post office.

The lady at the post office said the new restrictions are because of 9/11. I said, "so it has taken them 6 years to implement this?!" Her response was, "yeah, it's a wonder we haven't been blown up, huh?"

Sheesh.

I was furious, since not being able to ship out our books (which are 13.2 ounces, by the way) is a big problem for me. However, after further investigation on the USPS site, it turns out you can use their "Click-N-Ship" service to add postage. Of course, it means I no longer can send anything via Media Mail without going to the Post Office, since Click-N-Ship only works for Priority Mail. It's also gonna take me a long, long time to use up the $100 of postage I just bought.

Between the new requirements and the recent rate increases, it's becoming a lot less appealing to ship USPS.