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Cringe: A staffer at the New Yorker makes up facts for his recent popular book, lies about it, apologizes, and resigns from the magazine. The publisher of his book is halting shipment of print books and taking the e-book off the market.

Yes, you can fact check claims of heaven.

Interesting in light of diminishing budgets and fewer resources being available for fact checking, etc.

Under normal circumstances, the fact that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, logged over 17,000 free views in a day on upstart "social publisher" Scribd would be the story. The real story, however, lurks in the comments left on the Scribd web site.

Publishers fail again at basic fact-checking.  The assumption must be that the reading public doesn't care about the truth when something is called a memoir.

Spotted by Meredith.

"I would love to go [home] with the Kindle during the holidays." This brings into mind the joy in the winter spent here in the states on Christmas with my family and electronic gizmos. With the day to day hustle we sometimes forget about the "have nots." This young man Eperence Uwera, a 13-year-old student is thankful for what some take for granted as just another toy for fun. The poignant thought of this article is that the digital the divide is hampering growth in poor or remote areas globally. An E-Book Revolution for Africa? duly notes that Amazon is lending a hand to bridge the digital gap in Africa, also prompting technological literacy; if there is such a term. The problem raised in this article is that programs such as Worldreader sometimes get neglected, because of maintenance delays or high overhead cost to keep operations afloat in poverty stricken areas. This program brings hope to the less fortune children of African to see the wealth of knowledge gained from ePub. Quickly disseminated information at 1,000 young minds access gives a decent outlook for Africa's future. Though the program touches a small fraction, the fact is this Kindle program is tripling the libraries of these impoverished provinces; and is a milestone for further development. Hopefully, Worldreader and programs like it can be sustained through the digital era and beyond. Publishing can change the world!!!

Blogs don't have editors or fact-checkers. Talk about value add.

Although this NYT opinion piece deals with more than just judicial censhorship, it give a very apocolyptic view of the influence of courts on higher education in several categories that I find very frightening in the same way that the fact that one judge was able to censor a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" without any academic review or input was bone-chilling to me.