NOTED PAPERBACKS\Orlando Sentinel.

"Being Digital," by Nicholas Negroponte; Vintage ($12)

Negroponte, a founder of MIT's Media Lab and a columnist for Wired magazine, is dyslexic and doesn't like to read. Still, he realizes most of us still get our information the old-fashioned way, although the digital world, with its instantaneous, inexpensive transfer of electronic data at the speed of light, is growing exponentially. Negroponte explains the hows and implications of our electronic future, from web sites to hypermedia. "Computing is not about computers any more," he notes. "It is about living."

"An Anthropologist on Mars," by Oliver Sacks; Vintage ($13)

"The Case of the Colorblind Painter," the first chapter in Sacks' new book, sounds like a Sherlock Holmes investigation. Indeed, Sacks, author of "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," is a detective of neurological mysteries, here discussing with insight and compassion seven individuals whose brains have gone awry. There is the surgeon who copes with Tourette's syndrome, the blind man whose vision is restored but who cannot adapt to a sighted world, the autistic professor with an extraordinary gift for understanding animals but who feels about humans "like an anthropologist on Mars."

"The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition," by Anne Frank; Anchor/Doubleday ($12.95)

The most widely read piece of Holocaust literature, Frank's diary has never been out of print since its first publication in 1947. This unabridged edition in a new English translation by Susan Massotty was published in hardcover last spring, 50 years after Frank's death in a German concentration camp. The restored passages are a reminder that Frank was a real teen-ager who fought with her mother, worried and wondered about boys and sex and growing up. That she never had the chance to grow up makes the diary almost unbearably poignant. And the new edition, with its more colloquial language, gives a greater depth to our understanding of Frank and her world, what she and her family endured.

"Edison: Inventing the Century," by Neil Baldwin; Hyperion ($14.95)

From the incandescent light to motion pictures, Thomas Alva Edison was a supreme inventor, registering more than 1,000 patents during his lifetime. Baldwin's illuminating biography paints Edison as a distracted genius and scientific recluse who used his deafness to distance himself from other people, especially his family.