The Latest Shiny Toy

Joel Johnson from Boing Boing reviews Amazon's Kindle, the latest ebook reader. Apparently, it's got potential. Still, I bet it would really suck if you got beach sand in it, or dropped it on the bus, or it fell in the tub, or your husband/wife tossed to the bedroom floor in the heat of passion.

Meanwhile, sadly, back on the home front, Americans are reading less and getting stupider as a result. In a New York Times story, a study by the National Endowment for the Arts shows that students' grades drop in most disciplines when reading isn't an active part of their lives. That's not just books, that's anything: magazines, newspapers, etc. While some would argue its a condition of income, the NYT reports that

Although some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.

So, in the future, there will be ebook readers but no readers of books?