What you do is what I've done in the 0.12 version of Archive::Zip that I'm going to upload to CPAN Real Soon Now.

You can fix _newFileHandle, but you'll run into problems (I think) when it goes to look at the file name. I've made a number of changes since 0.11; some of them have to do with reading from IO::Scalars. If you want to try out the latest version, you can try an almost-finished one at ftp://ftp.bike-nomad.com/public/Archive-Zip-0.12.tar.gz. I'd be interested to get your feedback.