Digital Technology

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. was expected to announce today that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

Researchers gathered recently in a small darkened lab near Santa Barbara, nervously pacing as a digital camera snapped hundreds of images of a shard of pottery resting a few feet below the lens. There was good reason for their anxiety. The terra-cotta fragment is about 3,000 years old and was inscribed with five lines of text that could alter knowledge about the existence of an ancient Judean kingdom.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a three-month moratorium on billboards and super-graphics wrapped around buildings, a pause designed to give the city time to replace its current restrictions on outdoor advertising, which many consider ineffective. The temporary ban comes after years of court challenges and political maneuvering that have undermined existing billboard regulations.

After he's finished his homework and his chores for the day, 8-year-old Skye Vaughn-Perling likes to read Dr. Seuss. He's a particular fan of the hijinks that ensue when the elephant Horton hears strange voices emanating from a dust speck in "Horton Hears a Who." He doesn't read from a dog-eared copy of the children's classic, though. Skye, who lives in Agoura Hills, often reads on his computer, pressing the arrow button when he wants to turn a page.

For more than a decade, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and others in the tech industry have touted a vision of a connected lifestyle, in which digital content can move across devices throughout the home and be taken on the go. It's been a slow march. But as Gates kicked off the International Consumer Electronics Show on Sunday, the industry has come further than ever in delivering on that concept. "Every year represents a lot of progress," he told the Associated Press.

The much-vaunted anti-piracy protection on the next generation of DVDs has been cracked, leaving films in the new high-definition formats vulnerable to copying. Hackers have defeated the core means for protecting the medium seen by Hollywood as a major new source of revenue as growth of traditional DVDs has slowed.

On a refreshingly cool morning, before the sun drenches every exposed grain of sand in this vast desert, Hemeid Sobhy sets out on foot from the Bedouin village where he lives with his parents and sisters. Neatly dressed in jeans, sport shirt and sturdy sandals, he walks 40 minutes to the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. He passes through a narrow door in the monastery's thick walls and makes his way past an ancient church and a warren of buildings, clustered along winding pathways.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. today begins selling films online as the leading seller of DVDs stakes a claim in the emerging market of movie downloading. The store, at www.walmart.com/videodownloads, makes Wal-Mart the first major retailer to offer downloadable digital movies from all the major Hollywood studios. The online DVD market is crowded with competitors, including Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, online retailer Amazon.com Inc.'

Digital media company RealNetworks Inc. posted lower quarterly profit Wednesday on sharply reduced proceeds from a legal settlement with Microsoft Corp. and forecast full-year results below expectations. Fourth-quarter net income was $39.3 million, or 22 cents a share, compared with $295.6 million, or $1.61, a year earlier.

The senior executive overseeing Kaiser Permanente's massive effort to digitize its members' medical records is being replaced, the company said Monday, the latest sign of turmoil for the $4-billion project, one of the nation's largest. The departure of Bruce Turkstra, interim chief information officer, comes just four months after he was tapped to replace the health maintenance organization's previous CIO, J. Clifford Dodd.