Digital | featured news

The pleasure of reading endures in the digital age, a USC Dornsife/L.A. Times poll shows. Six in 10 people say they like to read 'a lot,' and young adults read about as much as many of their elders. Reading habits may be fundamentally changing, but a new survey shows that the printed word remains fundamental.

At last, Harry Potter's adventures are available electronically. The seven novels about J.K. Rowling's boy wizard are for sale as e-books and audio books on the author's Pottermore website, the site's creators announced Tuesday.

U.S. album sales rose more than 3 percent last year for the first gain since 2004 — a sign that rising digital sales are finally stemming the decade-long decline of compact discs. The uptick to 458 million album sales was helped by the hugely popular sophomore album "21" from British singer Adele, which sold 5.8 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Huge interest in Adele also led to the sales of 856,000 copies of "19," her debut album from 2008.

At age 91, Ray Bradbury is making peace with the future he helped predict. The science fiction/fantasy author and longtime enemy of the e-book has finally allowed his dystopian classic "Fahrenheit 451" to be published in digital format. Simon & Schuster released the electronic edition Tuesday at a list price of $9.99.

Barnes & Noble's CFO resigned amid the bookseller's shift to digital technologies, naming Controller Allen Lindstrom as interim CFO.

South Korea, one of the world's highest-rated education systems, aims to consolidate its position by digitising its entire curriculum. By 2015, it wants to be able to deliver all its curriculum materials in a digital form through computers. The information that would once have been in paper textbooks will be delivered on screen.

Seventh-grade history teacher Mark Stevens bellowed a set of 21st-century instructions as students streamed into class one recent Friday at Fairfax County’s Glasgow Middle School. “Get a computer, please! Log on,” he said, “and go to your textbook.”

In the midst of an essay on teaching long-form reading that’s well worth your time, Alan Jacobs sticks in a little tidbit about how the Kindle saved him from losing the ability to read books.

FOR decades, even after it was renamed and relocated from its original home at Radcliffe, the Columbia Publishing Course seemed unchanging, a genteel summer tradition in the book business, a white-glove six-week course in which ambitious college graduates were educated in the time-honored basics of book editing, sales, cover design and publicity. Not this summer.

In my teens, I never went on vacation without my yellow Sony Walkman. Today's travel gear may be more sophisticated, but the premise is the same: high tech toys that help out when it's time for R&R. When I'm leaving on a trip, I spend hours syncing iPads, iPhones, and eReaders with my media library so I can watch new episodes of AMC's "The Killing," listen to tech podcasts, or read ebooks. But you need fun gear to play all of this digital content too.