Digital, E-book | featured news

The paperback of “Fifty Shades of Grey” is exactly like the digital version except for this: If you hate the paperback, you can give it away or resell it. If you hate the e-book, you’re stuck with it.

I have noticed over the years that every so often magazines (and now blogs) feature beautiful spreads of book-filled rooms, with headlines like “Living With Books” or “The Pages of Our Lives.” Usually the images feature poetic, far-off places where leather volumes fill 15-foot-tall, wood-paneled shelves, or sparse rooms with gauzy curtains have stacks of books on the floor, standing like architectural columns. As a book lover, I find these rooms transporting and inspirational but totally out of touch. A growing number of people, I think, don’t have books.

... Yes, the words are the same, whether perceived on paper or on a small, illuminated screen. But the experience is not. One can read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” on a Kindle or an iPad, but one cannot see, hear, feel and smell the story in the same way. I’m unlikely to race to the sofa, there to nuzzle an electronic gizmo, with the same anticipation as with a book. Or to the hammock with the same relish I would with a new magazine. Somehow, napping with a gadget blinking notice of its dwindling power doesn’t hold the same appeal as falling asleep in the hammock with your paperback opened to where you dozed off.

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.

With ebook sales on the rise, how is the publishing industry embracing the world of digital? Next week some of the biggest names in publishing will gather at the Hilton in London's Park Lane for The Bookseller Industry Awards.

Wednesday was a dark day for the future of books. The Department of Justice charged Apple and five large book publishers with conspiring to raise e-book prices. Three of the five publishers quickly capitulated rather than face the risk and expense of a protracted legal battle.

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.

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.