Seacoast Blog #82
February 7, 2010

I wish I had more time for Kenneth Roberts. He not only managed to turn writing about history into a profitable career, but he did it right here where we live. And he did it time and time again, picking factual stories from the seacoast Maine and New Hampshire region and turning them into bestselling novels. He did it with "Indian fighter" Robert Rogers, and with Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear, and again with our Tory connection to Canada during the Revolution, and again with cannibalistic sailors on Boon Island just 12 miles off our shore. (Continued below)

Among the oddest of the movies by Louis de Rochemont is the animated version of George Orwell’s fable Animal Farm. That’s right, a Portsmouthm NH film producer made a totalitarian cartoon in which no one talks. It’s a fascinating story that involves E. Howard Hunt, the CIA and more. That story fills an entire book, but no time for all that here. Today we’re focused on a single footnote that is almost as strange. (Interview and photos below)

Every few years I seem to shed my digital skin and grow a new one. This is going to be one of those years. Learning curves can be time consuming and scary (I’m writing this in Word 97), but once the process starts, I find, you just have to hang on and ride it out. It’s like watching Avatar in 3D. At first you feel the SD glasses on your face. The special effects boggle your mind. You get a little headache, feel queasy, jump when sharp objects seem to poke out of the movie screen. But eventually, you’ve crossed over. You forget about the 3D glasses and settle back. Your brain has acclimated to the massive shift in information. The trick is knowing how far to move into the curve of the future, and how much of the past to cling to. (Continued below)

As an author with half a dozen projects developing I can’t wait to see how the ebook battles go in 2010. The Nook from Barnes & Noble finally arrived on Christmas Eve while the Kindle was the number one selling gift at Amazon.com. Publishers are freaking out over the increasing power of Kindle book buyers who are boycotting titles that cost more than $9.95. And for the first time in history, ebooks outsold paper books at Amazon on Christmas Day. (Continued below)

Amazon giveth and Amazon taketh away. The rise of the world’s biggest bookstore online has all but squashed the competing mom and pop bookstores. There were half a dozen in Portsmouth when I arrived thirty years ago and today there is one. Small stores just can’t compete on inventory with a home delivery service that carries every book ever written at slatshed discount prices. Then Amazon released the Kindle, a paper-like electronic reader that delivers books wirelessly in seconds even cheaper. Used books cost as little as one cent (plus $3.99 delivery) and thousands of e-books are free. But with each move Amazon makes to wipe out publishing as we once knew it, they create fresh new ways to discover and obtain books. (Continued below)

I just got the word that my collection of banks shaped like strawberries is on display at – yes – Strawbery Banke Museum. It’s there during stroll in a wooden and glass case in the Tyco Center. I’ve been waiting two years for this momentous event. It is my first museum display. Sure, it’s ktischy junk, but that’s why I love it. There are about 30 items in the collection. All have a strawbrry theme, and all are coin banks. It is the world’s largest collection of strawberry banks, the result of two or three years of intense searching through the cobwebby basement of eBay. Now finally, you can bask in the glory of this magnificent obsession. (Continued below)