1. Want to know what Marilyn Monroe read? How about George W. Bush?

Fragments assembles a bunch of hand-written Monroe miscellanea and offers some interesting peeks into the woman’s life. For example, it lists the books on her shelf:

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Paris Blues by Harold Flender
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Fall by Albert Camus
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck

Wait a minute. She looked like that, and she read Steinbeck? Other women never stood a chance.

Meanwhile, Carolyn Kellogg at The L.A. Times was good enough to list all of the books that Bush the Younger mentions in his autobiography, Decision Points.

In addition to The Bible and 14 Lincoln biographies, Bush says that he also had an aide read him Brave New World when he was thinking about stem cell research.

Yes, that’s right, he had it read to him.

2. Amazon is increasing the percentage of royalties that periodicals get when their e-quivalents are sold at the Kindle Store.

It’s not an insubstantial change either. Most periodicals will see their cut leap from about 30 percent to 70 percent of the sale value.

Amazon is doing this in hopes that newspapers and magazines will add their product to the Kindle Store.

And, in turn, people who buy e-readers other than Kindle will still use the store to buy periodicals.

3. Speaking of Amazon, they just removed a book entitled The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure from its Kindle Store.

And, yes, that book's subject matter is exactly what it sounds like.

The Guardian tells the entire story:

The blurb for Greaves’s book argued – through a blizzard of spelling errors – that it was the author’s “attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certain rules for these adults to follow” and “appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps lighter sentences should they ever be caught”...

In a statement, Amazon said it “believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable”, adding: “Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.” However, the offending Greaves ebook has now been taken down from the site.

5. Speaking of pedophiles, Dan Friedman raises an excellent point about Edward Cullen.