Books And Music That Make You Dumb

From The Wall Street Journal:

Anyone who has ever sought to justify their own musical or literary taste may find some solace in the side project of Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, the database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries.

With his two Web sites (which have crashed from too much traffic), Booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr, Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.

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What I Learned From Reading The Entire Bible

Good Book -- Slate

In 2006 and 2007, David Plotz blogged the Bible for Slate, starting with "In the beginning …" and reading right through to the end. This week, Plotz publishes Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, a book sparked by the Slate project. You can buy Good Book here. The following is adapted from the book.

Should you read the Bible? You probably haven't. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I've ever met, have not done much more than skim Genesis and Exodus. Even among the faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The Catholic Church, for example, includes only a teeny fraction of the Old Testament in its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible pretty well but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time on the Talmud and other commentary than on the Bible itself. Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible obsessively.

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My Comment: Bookyards section on the Bible is here.

Bookyards section on Christianity is here.

Bookyards list of free online libraries that focus on Religion and Christianity is here.

Google Wants To Shut Down Your Local Library, Bookstore And Amazon.com

From MSNBC:

Apparently it wasn't enough for Google to lend a major hand in taking out newspapers across the country but now the Silicon Valley giant wants to shut down your local library, bookstore and Amazon.com while they are at it.

Our friends at the New York Times, who are one of the major papers rumored to be looking for a new financially model, took an in depth look Wednesday at Google's seemingly innocuous attempt to scan and put every book ever published in every language in every country in history in the whole wide world on the Internet.

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Amazon Releases Kindle for IPhone

Image from Birighthand

From PC World:

Amazon.com released Kindle for iPhone late Tuesday night, providing iPhone users with the ability to read more than 240,000 Kindle-formatted books from Amazon's e-book library. It's a free download from the App Store.

Here's what Kindle for iPhone does: You can access all the Kindle e-books in your Amazon account, downloading and storing them on your iPhone or iPod touch for later reading. (Just enter in your Amazon user name and password to link your iPhone to your Kindle account.) The Kindle app will also sync your place to Amazon's servers, allowing you to switch between the iPhone and Kindle hardware without losing track of where you are.

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More News On Kindle

Amazon’s Kindle hits the iPhone -- CNN/Fortune
Amazon unveils Kindle Application for iPhone -- AP
New Amazon App Turns an iPhone into a Kindle E-Book Reader -- Brighthand
In-depth review: Kindle 2, the Apple TV of books -- Apple Insider
Comparing Kindle 2 with Kindle's iPhone app -- CNET
A Waste Of Effort: Amazon to Market Books on Apple iPhone -- Time Magazine
Kudos to Amazon: A good first step with Kindle iPhone app -- ZDNet
What Does Amazon's iPhone Kindle App Mean For The Kindle? -- Fast Company

Hearst Developing E-Reader For Magazines, Charging For E-News

From CNET News:

It looks as if the e-paper revolution is really about to start.

Hearst, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, announced on Friday that it has developed an electronic reader for newspapers and magazines, the way Amazon.com's new Kindle does for books. The publisher is also planning to put at least some of its online content behind a pay wall, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The e-reader news, first reported by Fortune magazine, is really significant, as Hearst owns about 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, and has a strong influence on hundreds of magazines. Examples of those include the San Francisco Chronicle, Oprah Winfrey's O, and Cosmopolitan.

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More News On Hearst's E-Reader

Hearst Planning Electronic Reader Alternative To Kindle -- Information Week
Can Hearst Save Newspapers With an E-Reader? -- PC World
Is Hearst Busting Out A Wireless E-Reader Of Its Own? -- Channel Web
Hearst to launch a wireless e-reader -- CNN Money Fortune
Report: Hearst May Make an E-Reader -- PC Magazine