The original three year, (yes,
long overdue)
and now decade long, project to re-release the aviation textbook
You Can Learn to Fly
continues with the release of a Kindle Reader version of the book.
As I write this (June 17, 2004,) the CD's are being
printed
and are ready ship the CD-ROM....
...Skip forward to November of 2011 and the re-release of You Can Learn to Fly continues as it has now been reformatted and re-released as a Kindle EBook which can be downloaded and read on any Kindle Reader, any PC, iPhone, Android or other mobile device by installing the Kindle Reader App.
Click here to Preview the converted Kindle Edition of "You Can Learn to Fly"
Click here to purchase and download the Kindle Edition
This excellent aviation textbook was co-written by Bevo and the well known aviation writer William Strohmeier. The foundation for this basic flying textbook was born from the authors' combined experience operating Army Air Corps primary flight training school at Hawthorne Field where the scool trained thousands of military pilots for the WWII effort in and around Orangeburg, South Carolina flying Stearmans.
As I went through the process of converting this textbook to it's new electronic format I was stunned to find, over and over again, the fact that many of the hard won aviation skills that I personally learned over many years in the air (the hard way) had been fully and effectively covered in this primary flight textbook. Had I taken the time to read this book in my youth, doing so would have saved me many hours of the traditional "trial and error" in the air learning process.
CD copies containing the PDF format copy of the book are still available by contacting me directly.
For those who have already purchased the CD version of this textbook and have a Kindle reader or device that supports the Kindle reader app or software, email me and I will send you a copy of the Kindle version of the book at no additional cost.
The current price for the CDRom version is now $20 plus $2 (USA) and $5 (International) shipping and handling.
For a copy the CD-Rom version, send a check or money order to;
YCLTF Re-Release
c/o Beverly Howard
205 Canyon Rim Dr
Austin, TX 78746-5016
USA
You may also contact me by phone at 512-394-4235 between
9am-8pm
central time.
At the start of this project in 2002, a year of experimenting with this book underscored the need to provide it in an EBook reader format that allowed fast loading and fast navigation, including easy searching for specific terms. Another feature was the addition of a hyperlinked table of contents. In addition to search options, the original textbook index is also preserved and hyperlinks added to every index entry allowing one click access to the original index referenced pages.
From the start, another primary goal was to provide
a
usable
reference book that was installable on a PDA to give the readers the
ability
to take the information with them and access it anywhere,
including
the cockpit of a two seat training aircraft.
There were limited EBook formats such as Microsoft's Reader when this conversion project began in 2004, and all proved to be unsuitable for any reference or text book for a number of reasons such as the difficulty to download, slow load and navigation times, so, the original conversion used Adobe's PDF "Acrobat" format.
It is now 2016 and EBook technology has evolved
significantly since the conversion was released in 2004.
The next step in keeping this valuable textbook alive and accessible to
anyone who is interested in learning and understanding the basics of
flight is in the Kindle EBook format. The Kindle and Kindle
reader apps provide instant loading, remembering your last page,
keeping notes and highlights as you read, searching and hyperlinks to
both locations within the book
as well as those on the internet. Reference notes on the Kindle
or Kindle apps made while reading are instantly accessible on any PC or
mobile device at this page.
In addition to a Kindle device providing a convenient way to carry and read the book, even in a
cockpit in full sunlight, the Kindle format is currently supported on
almost all mobile devices in use today by the use of the free Kindle
Reader "App" which can be easily installed on most phones and devices
such as the iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and many others.
Please contact me for reprint rights for other uses of the book's content and we will be happy to work with you to meet your needs.
The CDRom version contains installable copies of Windows Acrobat Reader and the PocketPC Acrobat Reader. These can be installed directly from the CD by simply clicking on the installation links in the CD's startup page. It also contains additional WWW links to download the readers for other computing platforms.
I am open to discuss any input on releasing it in other electronic or paper
formats.
Hawthorne also ran a Navy Primary Flight Training school in Columbia, SC as well that trained naval aviators using Piper Cubs rather then the Stearmans that were used in Orangeburg.
Going through this legal process while the Sonny Bono copyright extension to 70 years and the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) were headline news was educational.
My personal conclusion from this experience is that these dangerous extensions of the copyright laws are playing a major role in assuring that a high percentage of works written after 1930 will be lost forever as the diminishing number paper copies disappear and disintegrate while the legal copyright issues that remain in place will prevent all but the most dedicated from preserving earlier works in electronic format.
The final owner of this book's original publisher's
rights
(which, as far as I know, was never profitable) remained in total legal
control of the
future
of the reprint of this one work even though they didn't feel there was
any residual value in it and responded in lock step using such archaic
terms as "offset fees" and policies that didn't even acknowledge that
e-book
technology exists. From my perspective, the current laws relate
more to speculation and power than they do about protecting the rights
of the authors and originators of content, who are, in real life circumstances, frequently not
the beneficiaries of the protections provided by the current copyright law.
Time marches on. My father, Beverly Howard, was killed at the age of 57 while performing aerobatics at a charity air show in Greenville, NC in October of 1971.
The co-author of You Can Learn to Fly, William D. Strohmeier, died on September 24, 2009 at the age of 93.