Category: Shameless Horn-Tooting || By

A few notes of possible interest from the Almanac business office ...

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Downloadable Maps Online: Free, printable maps of Our Fair City and many surrounding municipalities can now be downloaded from the "Facts & Figures" department of Tube City Online.

Right now we have official state Department of Transportation maps for Dravosburg, East McKeesport, Elizabeth, Forward Township, Glassport, Liberty, Port Vue, West Mifflin, White Oak and Wilmerding. (The maps are available on PennDOT's website as a free download; we're hosting local copies strictly as a convenience.)

As time permits, we'll add other maps of local interest. We can't fill special requests, and we can't post copyrighted material, but if there's some community we should have, feel free to suggest it.

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Kindle This: You can now have Tube City Almanac delivered directly to your Amazon Kindle or iPhone. Cost is $1.99 per month, and there's a money-back guarantee from Amazon. Visit their website.

And if you don't know what a Kindle is, read this review at Gizmodo or this one at ZDNet.

Kindle is a lightweight, low-power "e-Book" reader that allows you to download entire books, magazines and newspapers while comfortably seated in the most important room of your home.

The Almanac thus joins such other prestigious journalistic organizations as the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde and U.S. News & World Report ... but not the Daily News, West Newton Times-Sun or the Munhall Valley Mirror, yet.

That last one is a real disappointment, because the information superhighway is crying out for the weekly "Earle's Pearls" column. We need more right-wing reactionaries ranting about the Obama administration based on what they heard the week before on Fox News.

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Last But Not Least: Angie Schmitt and Kate Giammarise's RustWire has an interview with city native, journalist and editor John Hoerr about his new novel set in McKeesport, Monongahela Dusk.

A McKeesport High and Penn State alumnus who had a long career as a labor editor and reporter for Business Week and WQED-TV, among other outlets, Hoerr is perhaps best known for his 1988 book And the Wolf Finally Came, which is arguably the definitive history of the decline of the American steel industry.

Monongahela Dusk isn't being released until Aug. 15, but if you order before Aug. 1, you receive a 25 percent discount. Call Autumn House Press at (412) 381-4261.