Consumers

Trodding heavily toward you like a 300-foot blue elephant in a band uniform, The Beatles: Rock Band video game will consume much of the industry's advertising bandwidth this summer ahead of its Sept. 9 release. A collaboration between MTV Games' Harmonix and the Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd.

Kristina Schauer followed all the instructions to bring the promised benefits of digital television -- clearer reception and more free channels -- to her Santa Monica condominium. The 32-year-old stay-at-home mom bought a converter box, hooked it up to her old 17-inch Toshiba set and attached the rabbit-ears antenna. She then scanned for the digital signals that all Los Angeles stations and most nationwide have been transmitting in advance of turning off their analog broadcasts.

So you got yourself one of those widely advertised Obama coins from Franklin Mint that's covered in 24-carat gold and depicts the president-elect. With it came a "certificate of authenticity," signed by the 36th director of the U.S. Mint, Jay W. Johnson. The good news: The coin, priced at $9.95, has guaranteed monetary value. The bad: That guaranteed value is only 50 cents. Also, although Johnson is a real person, he hasn't been director of the U.S. Mint since 2001.

People holding California state IOUs -- including taxpayers, vendors and local governments -- will soon have a tougher time redeeming them, as most major banks are standing firm on a vow not to cash the vouchers after today. Many credit unions say they will continue to redeem the IOUs for customers.

There is a battle for America's behinds. It is a fight over toilet paper: the kind that is blanket-fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for "soft" (Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand to go three ply and three adjective). It's a menace, environmental groups say -- and a dark-comedy example of American excess. The reason, they say, is that plush U.S. toilet paper is usually made by chopping down and grinding up trees that were decades or even a century old. Environmentalists want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods.

Marco Huerta and Youngmin Bae bought their Burbank home without ever meeting their real estate agent. Instead, they scoured listings for their favorite neighborhoods, haggled over prices and even wrote their offer using Marco's cellphone. There was no housewarming plant on the porch when they moved in, but the couple aren't complaining: They received a $10,000 check as a "rebate" from their agent's 3% commission. "It's a great incentive," said Marco Huerta, 32.

Maricela Castellanos sat at her desk, the telephone pressed to her ear, a chill running through her body. A representative from her mortgage company was on the line with troubling information about the loan on Castellanos' Hesperia home. No one at the company had previously been in contact with her, Castellanos recalled the man saying. The bank had no record of a new loan agreement with her, he said, nor had it received cashier's checks for $2,260 and $1,408.23 she said she had sent.

Hoping to buy his first home this year, Ralph Bustamante paid off his credit cards and cleared dings on his credit report to ensure that he'd be able to get a loan. Bustamante had hoped to pull his FICO scores, used by most lenders as a standard of creditworthiness, from the three major credit bureaus so he could negotiate the best possible mortgage rate. Make that two credit bureaus. One of the companies, Experian Group Ltd., will stop selling FICO scores to individual consumers Saturday.

Trying to expand its book sales, Amazon.com Inc. released a free application Wednesday that lets iPhone and iPod Touch users read electronic books purchased at the e-commerce giant's Kindle online bookstore. The software performs many of the same functions featured on Amazon's $359 Kindle 2 reading device released last month, including bookmarking, noting, highlighting and adjusting the font size, the company said.

As the goods in our daily lives transform from analog to digital, it's hard not to wonder: Where did all our stuff go? We take photos, but the leather albums remain empty. The music collection bulges but requires no space next to the stereo. When "War and Peace" lives on electronic reading devices, it can no longer serve as a doorstop or a sign of being well-read.