[PHOTO] Rose by the window

The roses growing in the window of the office of New York City dentist Joseph Sachs, whose office is on 201 West 18th Street just off of Seventh Avenue, caught my attention as I passed by. New York City tends to itself quite well.

[LINK] "The French Still Flock to Bookstores"

This New York Times article by the New York Times's Paris correspondent Elaine Sciolino examines how French-language bookstores in France continue to survive, thanks to very specific policies aimed at subsidizing traditional channels for literary production and distribution. (Cultural biases towards the printed word go only so far.)

The French, as usual, insist on being different. As independent bookstores crash and burn in the United States and Britain, the book market in France is doing just fine. France boasts 2,500 bookstores, and for every neighborhood bookstore that closes, another seems to open. From 2003 to 2011 book sales in France increased by 6.5 percent.

E-books account for only 1.8 percent of the general consumer publishing market here, compared with 6.4 percent in the United States. The French have a centuries-old reverence for the printed page.

“There are two things you don’t throw out in France — bread and books,” said Bernard Fixot, owner and publisher of XO, a small publishing house dedicated to churning out best sellers. “In Germany the most important creative social status is given to the musician. In Italy it’s the painter. Who’s the most important creator in France? It’s the writer.”

A more compelling reason is the intervention of the state. In the Anglophone book world the free market reigns; here it is trumped by price fixing.

Since 1981 the “Lang law,” named after its promoter, Jack Lang, the culture minister at the time, has fixed prices for French-language books. Booksellers — even Amazon — may not discount books more than 5 percent below the publisher’s list price, although Amazon fought for and won the right to provide free delivery.

Last year as French publishers watched in horror as e-books ate away at the printed book market in the United States, they successfully lobbied the government to fix prices for e-books too. Now publishers themselves decide the price of e-books; any other discounting is forbidden.

There are also government-financed institutions that offer grants and interest-free loans to would-be bookstore owners.

Even in France, though, traditional bookstores are menaced because of the inexorable economic and technological chains that have undermined bookstores in the developed English-speaking world.

Beneath the surface there are predictions that France is only delaying the inevitable, and that sooner or later market forces will prevail. Despite the appeal of the neighborhood bookstore 13 percent of French books were bought on the Internet in 2011.

An agreement that Google announced this month with the French Publishers Association and the Société des Gens de Lettres, an authors’ group, should allow publishers to offer digital versions of their works for Google to sell. Until now sales of e-books have lagged in France and much of the rest of Europe in part because of disputes over rights.

“We are in a time of exploration, trial and error, experimentation,” Bruno Racine, president of the French national library, wrote in his 2011 book, “Google and the New World.” “Many scenarios are envisioned. The least probable is certainly that of a victorious resistance of the paper book.”

A 59-page study by the Culture Ministry in March made recommendations to delay the decline of print sales, including limiting rent increases for bookstores, emergency funds for booksellers from the book industry and increased cooperation between the industry and government.

“Running a bookstore is a combat sport,” the report concluded.

What will come next?

[LINK] On the planetary system of Kepler-36

News of the unusual planetary system of Kepler-36 has spread widely--Wired News carries it, for instance. I quite liked Nancy Atkinson's exposition on it at Universe Today.

Imagine if the Neptune was only a million miles from Earth. What a view we’d have! … not to mention some incredible gravitational effects from the close-by, gigantic planet. A similar scenario is taking place for real in star system in the constellation Cygnus. A newly found planet duo orbiting a sun-like star come together in extremely close proximity, and strangely enough, the two planets are about as opposite as can be: one is a rocky planet 1.5 times the size of Earth and weighs 4.5 times as much, and the other is a gaseous planet 3.7 times the size of Earth and weighing 8 times that of Earth.

“They are the closest to each other of any planetary system we’ve found,” said Eric Agol of the University of Washington, co-author of a new paper outlining the discovery of this interesting star system by the Kepler spacecraft. “The bigger planet is pushing the smaller planet around more, so the smaller planet was harder to find.”

Known as Kepler-36, the star is a several billion years older than our Sun, and at this time is known to have just two planets.

The inner rocky world, Kepler-36b orbits about every 14 days at an average distance of less than 11 million miles, while the outer gas “hot Neptune” planet orbits once each 16 days at a distance of 12 million miles.

The two planets experience a conjunction every 97 days on average. At that time, they are separated by less than 5 Earth-Moon distances. Since Kepler-36c is much larger than the Moon, it presents a spectacular view in its neighbor’s sky. And the science team noted that the smaller Kepler-36b would appear about the size of the Moon when viewed from Kepler-36c).

But the timing of their orbits means they’ll never collide, Agol said. However, close encounters of this kind would cause tremendous gravitational tides that squeeze and stretch both planets.

[. . .]

From their calculations, the team estimates the smaller planet is 30 percent iron, less than 1 percent atmospheric hydrogen and helium and probably no more than 15 percent water. The larger planet, on the other hand, likely has a rocky core surrounded by a substantial amount of atmospheric hydrogen and helium.

The planets’ densities differ by a factor of eight but their orbits differ by only 10 percent. The big differences in composition and the close proximity of the two is quite a head-scratcher, as current models of planet formation don’t really predict this. But the team is wondering if there are more systems like this out there.