SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea is embracing the digital age, encouraging its citizens to go online and even boasting about the popularity of that obligatory electronic accessory in the 21st century: MP3 players.

In video footage taken by Associated Press Television News in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, students were seen clicking away on computers while viewing sleek flat-screen displays at a new electronic library at Kim Chaek University of Technology. The library, which opened last month, has 10 million titles on its local intranet, the university spokeswoman said.

"Our e-library built under the deep love and concern of the great general Kim Jong Il is superior compared with other libraries because the students can search and access any kind of books that they want to read in a quicker way," spokeswoman Won Yun Ae told APTN.

Students were seen using Internet Explorer to look at a Web page titled "electronic book search." In another computer room, portraits of late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong Il peered down at the students.

Still, North Koreans aren't quite jumping on the information superhighway. The state of technology is a far cry from neighboring capitalist South Korea -- which boasts of being the world's most-wired country with the highest per capita broadband connections.

The books available online at the university are approved by authorities in North Korea, where all media is state-run, and are mostly technical or scientific. The North Korean government tightly restricts access to the broader, worldwide Internet.

The U.S. State Department's 2005 report on human rights in North Korea said that the government "sought to control virtually all information" and that outside Internet access is provided only to high-ranking officials and other elites.

According to a 2003 estimate in the CIA World Factbook, there were only about 980,000 phone lines in the country of 23 million people, and international calls are strictly limited. Universities have only limited e-mail access.

Seeking to maintain its control over the outside information that reaches its people in its self-proclaimed "socialist paradise," the North has developed its own national intranet, which is set to be extended nationwide and to private homes, university officials said.

For now, the e-library's contents can be accessed primarily from other universities and some state-run organizations.

Private demand for computers also is increasing, vendors said.

At the Pyongyang IT service center, computers are on sale for as little as $90 for a secondhand desktop to more than $1,000 for a new computer. The company sells about 100 new and used computers a month, managers said, with three stores in Pyongyang and several branches across the country.

"My household is now connected with the library so I can read the books on my computer at home," said Pak Yong Hye, a student at the library.

Still, the prices put them far out of reach from what a typical North Korean could afford in a country where average salaries for urban factory workers are equivalent to $1 a month, according to the U.N. World Food Program.

One of the stores in Pyongyang had pristine glass cases filled with laptop computers and CD-ROMs with software, in footage taken by APTN.

And one gadget is especially popular among youths: MP3 players. Like the Internet, access to music from outside the country is strictly controlled.

"Students are interested in MP3 players, and the hardware is popular in private households," said Kim Hyang, a shop assistant, who boasted the store gets "many orders every day."