When travelers search for the best hotel reservation, they look for things like the right price, the right location, a clean bathroom, and oh yes -- some soft-core porn on the bedside table. Forget the Bible. A hotel in England has replaced their Gideon's Bibles with copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. Because that's what you do now if you want your guests to truly feel at home.

Owner Jonathan Denby felt that in this secular age, it was "inappropriate" to keep religious materials in bedside tables. He decided to stock his tables with something else and figured, "Because everybody is reading Fifty Shades of Grey, we thought it would be a hospitable thing to do, to have this available for our guests, especially if some of them were a little bit shy about buying it because of its reputation."

Yeah, right. People are "shy" about buying it. That would explain why it's the best-selling book in the UK EVER. Why it actually rivals the Bible as one of the most-read books in the world. But sure, go ahead and accommodate those three or four shy persons who still haven't worked up the gumption to buy the book.

But I think it's a smart move. See, we've read all the rape and bondage scenes in the Bible already. (Oh yeah, it's in there, but the prose is a little stilted and you have to wade through all those "begats.") Time for an updated version, with racier "commandments" and fewer life lessons and morals. Morals are hard! Bubble baths with E.L. James are easy. I mean, we're on vacation, all right?

By the way, Damson Dene Hotel is in the Lake District, home of English literary heroes Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. The poor gents are no doubt rolling in their graves at the thought that English majors from all over are reading that tortured prose before stomping all over their hallowed homes.

Do you think replacing the Bible with Fifty Shades is scandalous or a good idea?

Image via mootown/Flickr