Internet, Digital | featured news

After a Justice Department investigation into e-book price-fixing, the cost of buying an e-book was supposed to plunge, but sales of e-readers and the content for them have stalled.

At the University of Tulsa school, students learn to write computer viruses, hack digital networks and mine data from broken cellphones. Many graduates head to the CIA or NSA.

Newsweek's decision to stop publishing a print edition after 80 years and bet its life entirely on a digital future may be more a commentary on its own problems than a definitive statement on the health of the magazine industry....

Newsweek will end its print publication after 80 years and shift to an all-digital format in early 2013. Its last U.S. print edition will be its Dec. 31 issue. The paper version of Newsweek is the latest casualty of a changing world where readers get more of their information from websites, tablets and smartphones. It's also an environment in which advertisers are looking for less expensive alternatives online.

Four years ago, then-Sen. Barack Obama got a head start on Arizona Sen. John McCain when it came to reaching voters online, on their mobile phones and on social media. Young voters, the group most likely to tune in digitally to the presidential campaign, broke overwhelmingly for Obama, giving him the biggest margin of victory among that age group ever recorded....

Google has reached a deal with a publishing group to allow the scanning and publishing of books online - ending a six-year legal battle. A court ruled in 2009 that the search company was in breach of copyright infringement after it digitised a number of French books.

The Social Security Administration is now providing workers with online statements of the estimated benefits they will get when they retire, replacing the paper ones the agency used to mail out. Until last year, the agency mailed yearly statements that showed the benefits a worker would collect if he or she retired at age 62, age 66 or age 70. It stopped the mailings to save an estimated $70 million a year.

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.

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.”

Harry Potter battled the forces of evil and now is set to conquer the web - coming to e-books in a groundbreaking deal that has delighted fans but alarmed the book industry that helped make creator J.K. Rowling a billionaire.