Digital | featured news

Drivers approaching the majestic Golden Gate Bridge experienced something new on Wednesday - no human toll collectors. The workers were removed in favor of cheaper and faster electronic transponders, and a camera system that photographs every license plate that comes through, mailing an invoice to each motorist who doesn't prepay.

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.

The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said Tuesday that its global sales had risen last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have finally begun.

Newsstand sales of consumer magazines dropped 8.2% in the second half of 2012 from a year earlier, while paid subscriptions saw modest growth of 0.7%. Digital editions expanded their presence.

Studios are moving to stop distributing 35-millimeter film prints. Converting to digital is an expense many theaters in the fading drive-in industry can't afford.

Some of Hollywood's big-name mobsters joined forces with a Florida-based non-profit Friday to help save small-town theaters. Owners of small cinemas across the country must switch from 35 mm film to digital - or go silent. The conversion requires new projection equipment, computers and a sound system that can average around $70,000 per screen.

... 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.

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.