If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book.
Amazon calls this new feature “popular highlights.” It may sound innocuous enough, but it augurs even bigger changes to come.
Though the feature can be disabled by the user, “popular highlights” will no doubt alarm Nicholas Carr, whose new book, “The Shallows,” argues that the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.
With “popular highlights,” even when we manage to turn off Twitter and the television and sit down to read a good book, there will a chorus of readers turning the pages along with us, pointing out the good bits. Before long, we’ll probably be able to meet those fellow readers, share stories with them. Combating loneliness? David Foster Wallace saw only the half of it.
Mr. Carr’s argument is that these distractions come with a heavy cost, and his book’s publication coincides with articles in various publications — including The New York Times — that report on scientific studies showing how multitasking harms our concentration.
Thus far, the neuroscience of multitasking has tended to follow a predictable pattern. Scientists take a handful of test subjects out of their offices and make them watch colored squares dance on a screen in a lab somewhere. Then they determine that multitasking makes you slightly less able to focus. A study reported on early this month found that heavy multitaskers performed about 10 to 20 percent worse on most tests than light multitaskers.
These studies are undoubtedly onto something — no one honestly believes he is better at focusing when he switches back and forth between multiple activities — but they are meaningless as a cultural indicator without measuring what we gain from multitasking.
Thanks to e-mail, Twitter and the blogosphere, I regularly exchange information with hundreds of people in a single day: scheduling meetings, sharing political gossip, trading edits on a book chapter, planning a family vacation, reading tech punditry. How many of those exchanges could happen were I limited exclusively to the technologies of the phone, the post office and the face-to-face meeting? I suspect that the number would be a small fraction of my current rate.
I have no doubt that I am slightly less focused in these interactions, but, frankly, most of what we do during the day doesn’t require our full powers of concentration. Even rocket scientists don’t do rocket science all day long.
To his credit, Mr. Carr readily concedes this efficiency argument. His concern is what happens to high-level thinking when the culture migrates from the page to the screen. To the extent that his argument is a reminder to all of us to step away from the screen sometimes, and think in a more sedate environment, it’s a valuable contribution.
But Mr. Carr’s argument is more ambitious than that: the “linear, literary mind” that has been at “the center of art, science and society” threatens to become “yesterday’s mind,” with dire consequences for our culture. Here, too, I think the concerns are overstated, though for slightly different reasons.
Presumably, the first causalities of “shallow” thinking should have appeared on the front lines of the technology world, where the participants have spent the most time in the hyperconnected space of the screen. And yet the sophistication and nuance of media commentary has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. Mr. Carr’s original essay, published in The Atlantic — along with Clay Shirky’s more optimistic account, which led to the book “Cognitive Surplus” — were intensely discussed throughout the Web when they first appeared as articles, and both books appear to be generating the same level of analysis and engagement in long form.
The intellectual tools for assessing the media, once the province of academics and professional critics, are now far more accessible to the masses. The number of people who have written a thoughtful response to Mr. Carr’s essay — and, even better, published it online — surely dwarfs the number of people who wrote in public about “Understanding Media,” by Marshall McLuhan, in 1964.
Mr. Carr spends a great deal of his book’s opening section convincing us that new forms of media alter the way the brain works, which I suspect most of his readers have long ago accepted as an obvious truth. The question is not whether our brains are being changed. (Of course new experiences change your brain — that’s what experience is, on some basic level.) The question is whether the rewards of the change are worth the liabilities.
The problem with Mr. Carr’s model is its unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading. For society to advance as it has since Gutenberg, he argues, we need the quiet, solitary space of the book. Yet many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise. (Gutenberg himself borrowed his printing press from the screw presses of Rhineland vintners, as Mr. Carr notes.)
It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading.
Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.
Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.
And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.
Steven Johnson is an author and entrepreneur. His new book, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” will be published in October.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs introducing the iPad at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, January 27, 2010
As just about every sentient being knows, Apple Computer launched its “revolutionary,”1 “game changing,”2 “magical”3 tablet computer, the iPad, on April 3. This was after years of rumors, dating back almost a decade,4 but starting in earnest in February 2006,5 when Apple filed a number of patent applications that hinted at its intentions to move into touch computing. Though this turned out to be the prelude to the iPhone, tablet rumors began building again throughout the summer and fall of 2008 and into 2009,6 despite consistent denials from the company. By following the age-old dating protocol—flirt, be coy, don’t call back, flirt some more—Apple successfully turned up the dial on desire: here was a device that, sight unseen, large numbers of people wanted and believed they had to have, even without knowing precisely what it was or what it did.
In October 2009, at about the same time that rumors about the phantom Apple tablet were beginning to swirl, but before they coalesced into a media suck, the bookstore chain Barnes and Noble issued a product announcement of its own. It was getting into the electronic book reader business (again, ten years after its failed RockBook launch) with a small device called the Nook, reminiscent of Amazon’s popular electronic book reader, the Kindle, whose dominance it meant to challenge. Though The Wall Street Journal gamely live-blogged the launch, which took place in a basement conference room at the Chelsea Piers sports complex in Manhattan, and despite an overrun of holiday preorders for the Nook, once Apple revealed, right around Christmas, that it was planning a major product announcement at the beginning of the new year, excitement that another player had entered the e-book arena dulled.
At the Nook event, there was a lot of talk about the book industry and the future of books and the promise of e-books. Stephen Riggio, the CEO of Barnes and Noble, pointed out that publishing was still big business; at $30 billion a year, it was bigger than both the music and film industries.7 He also observed that readers wanted books on demand, which is what the Nook—with its access to the Barnes and Noble catalog, as well as to the more than one million scanned public domain books already on offer through various online sites, and, most likely, to the millions of books promised by the pending Google Books settlement as well—would give them.
Riggio pointed out all the ways that the Nook was different from the Kindle: it was based on Google’s open-source Android operating system, it used the nonproprietary ePub format, it had both wireless and 3G Internet access, it had a dash of color and a rudimentary touch screen, and it could be used to play music. He didn’t have to say that with an estimated three million Kindles in circulation, Barnes and Noble was playing catch-up to Amazon. It didn’t help that, aside from having a small touch screen rather than a keyboard, the Nook looked nearly identical to its rival, or that in its first iteration, the one that landed in the hands of reviewers like The New York Times‘s David Pogue, its underlying software was buggy and slow, or that due to supply issues, the company was unable to put Nooks under the Christmas tree. The machine didn’t actually ship till February, which is to say after Steve Jobs’s exultant iPad unveiling at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco on January 27, but before anyone could get their hands on an iPad, when desire for it was most pronounced. So while the iPad didn’t render the Nook dead on arrival, initial Nook sales, estimated to be around 60,000 units, were not strong enough to test the Kindle’s preeminence, let alone toss a lifeline to the publishing industry, if that’s what trying to capture a share of the growing electronic book market was expected to do.
Stephen Riggio was working with old data when he spoke that day at Chelsea Piers. According to the Association of American Publishers, book sales fell nearly 2 percent last year, to $23.9 billion.8 Educational books and paperbacks took the biggest hit. Their downward trajectory seemed to confirm what Steve Jobs said to The New York Times back in early 2008, when he reflected on, and then dismissed, the newly released Kindle, a device “which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.” “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” Jobs told the Times. “Forty percent of the people in the US read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”9
Imagine his surprise, just two years later, when the number of book apps—books that can be read on the iPhone and iPod touch—surpassed the number of game apps in Apple’s own App Store, and sales of digital books for machines like the Kindle and the Sony Reader tripled, to over $313 million, with analysts at Goldman Sachs predicting that US sales of e-books would grow to $3.2 billion by 2015, and that Apple would command a third of that pie.^10 Most people may not have been reading, but those who were doing so on digital readers seemed to be reading a lot.
In 2008, visitors to Apple’s iTunes store downloaded one book app for every six game apps. Last year, that ratio was one to four. By the time Steve Jobs took to the Yerba Buena Center stage it was obvious that he had been wrong about readers and reading, and wrong about the Kindle itself. His mea culpa came in the form of a picture of a Kindle, projected on the big screen behind him, and the words: “That’s an e-book reader. Now, Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with its Kindle. And we’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit further.” With that, he introduced Apple’s own e-book reader in the form of an iPad application called iBook. As he paced the stage, highlighting its “functionality,” the audience periodically broke out in spontaneous applause, even when it became clear that iBooks would be readable only on the iPad, and even when he noted that Apple was working directly with publishers, who would be setting their own prices, which were most likely going to be three or four or five dollars higher than Amazon’s loss-leading, penny-less-than-ten-dollars standard, and their own policies, which might keep new books off the e-book shelf so they wouldn’t compete with hardback sales. Prices and policies, that is, that appeared to favor publishers over consumers in the short run, which many publishers considered to be essential to the health of their industry.
You don’t have to be a technophobe or a Luddite to dismiss out of hand the idea of reading on a machine. Maybe it is muscle memory, but there is something deeply satisfying about a “real” book, a book made of pages bound between hard or soft covers, into which you can slip a bookmark, whose pages you can fan, whose binding you can crack and fold as you move from beginning to end. E-books, by contrast, whatever platform delivers them, are ephemeral. Yes, you can carry thousands of them in your pocket, but what will you have to show for it? What will fill your bookshelves? Then, one day, you find yourself housebound, and Wolf Hall has just won the Booker Prize, and you download a sample onto your iPhone, and just like with a book printed on paper you are pulled into the story and are grateful to be able to keep reading, and your resistance disappears, and you press the “buy” button—it’s so easy!—and that is how it starts.
There are two basic ways, so far, that words are displayed on a small screen, and those different ways offer different reading experiences that may influence whether you find reading on a handheld electronic device satisfying or not. There is “E Ink,” which reflects light rather than emitting it, and looks surprisingly like regular ink, though the page itself is grayer and offers less contrast; and there are liquid crystal displays (LCDs), pixels filled with liquid crystals arrayed in front of a light source that can be dimmed or brightened. The Kindle and the Nook, which are both monochrome readers (though the Nook has that petite color touch screen where it’s possible to see a thumbnail image of a book jacket), use E Ink. The iPhone and iPad are LCDs, and both are backlit. Backlit screens are hard, if not impossible, to read outside or in direct sunlight, and held at certain angles have a mirror effect so that the reader’s face is superimposed on the screen. Reflective E Ink screens, meanwhile, are difficult, if not impossible, to see in low light—forget reading under the covers. One is not better than the other; they are both flawed. New “transreflective” technology11 will bridge this divide, but that’s in the future.
When the Nook was announced, tech pundits wondered aloud if it would be a “Kindle killer.” It wasn’t, because, while it generally improves on Amazon’s model by, for example, being easier to navigate, it’s basically the same thing—a small, lightweight, pocketable, durable, black-and-white book reader. Both are simple to operate. Both allow access to hundreds of thousands of titles, the Kindle through Amazon’s extensive bookstore, the Nook through Barnes and Noble’s. While I prefer the Nook because it connects to the Internet through both Wi-Fi and 3G, unlike the Kindle, which has only 3G connectivity and is not operable without being tethered to a computer to retrieve books in certain geographic regions (like mine) with poor access to 3G, the reading experience is indistinguishable.
True, the Nook has the capacity for listening to music and now, with its most recent software update, for simple Web browsing and playing a couple of games, but these features are, so far, primitive and uninspiring. The real difference between the two machines, and the one that matters, is that the Nook is built around the ePub format, which is open and freely available for any device, unlike the Kindle’s proprietary format, which functions only for Kindle. The ePub format is used by every electronic reader except the Kindle, and promises to be a big selling point for Google Editions, the search firm’s planned Web-based electronic bookstore scheduled to launch this summer, which will allow buyers to read books and much else on any number of devices. (This may include, by year’s end, Google’s own tablet computer.) It’s through ePub that readers have instant access to millions of books in the public domain,12 that electronic publishing has a chance to become standardized, and that writers will have more options when it comes to disseminating and selling their books. As the Jacket Copy blog in the Los Angeles Times pointed out, “Theoretically, an individual author could create an EPub e-book and publish from home.”13 The implications go deep.
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Competing e-book readers: Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle
The headline of that piece, published the day of the iPad unveiling, was “The iPad Shows Up the Kindle.” And it did. When Steve Jobs projected the image of the iPad after his damned-with-faint-praise nod to the Kindle, the Kindle looked comically out of date, a relic, like a black-and-white TV next to a fifty-eight-inch plasma HDTV. As an analyst for the investment bank Needham and Company put it a week after the iPad went on sale and nearly half a million units flew out the door, the Kindle is “not a compelling product.”14 Even so, he and a number of other forecasters estimated that upward of three million of them would be sold in the coming year. (According to Apple, a million iPads were sold in the first month.)
What this suggests is that there remain good reasons to buy an uncompelling e-book reader like the Kindle rather than a polished, entertaining, ingenious Apple tablet. E-book readers are smaller (so far) and lighter and can slip into an even more compact space than a traditional paperback book. By contrast, the iPad is a fairly large slab, nearly as big as a page of manuscript paper and, at about 1.5 pounds, decidedly heavier. Dedicated e-book readers are considerably less expensive than the iPad and likely to drop in price to stay competitive. (Amazon has even begun giving away free Kindles to its most active book buyers, which of course will lock those buyers into continuing to purchase e-books from Amazon.) E-book readers can be used outdoors and in direct sunlight indoors. And, perhaps most crucially, even though the move is on to add Web browsing, so far electronic book readers reduce the temptation to check e-mail or the baseball score or stock prices or headlines or Twitter or all of the above every few minutes, allowing a reader to do what readers typically like to do most: get lost in the pages of a book. That the pages are not made of paper, that the ink is made from electrical charges, does not matter.
The iPad, in contrast, celebrates and enables mental roving. You can check e-mail, listen to the radio, watch a film, play poker, read the headlines, edit photos, compose a song, shop for shoes, track calories, look up recipes, and on and on, and you can read a book and write one, too (though typing on the keyboard screen is hit-or-miss and editing with Apple’s $9.99 touch-based word-processing program is as messy as eating with your fingers). What you can’t do, with few exceptions, is do these things simultaneously. You may want to check e-mail while a commercial is playing during an episode of Lost, but pressing the mail icon shuts off the ABC icon. You may need to convert dollars to kroner while searching for hotels in Oslo, but if you’re looking for those hotels on the Kayak app, it will disappear once you tap your finger on the conversion app. Multitasking, which may soon come to the iPhone, is absent here, which makes the iPad less like a computer and more like the large-print version of the iPod Touch.
In the meantime, news organizations like the BBC, NPR, and Reuters show what’s possible with the iPad technology, providing up-to-the-minute written reports on the events of the day supplemented by high-quality, often stunning, audio and video. On the BBC site, for example, it’s possible to tune in to live radio while scrolling through the day’s stories, while NPR’s masterful application lets you read, view photos, and listen to pieces from a slew of public radio shows. Whether all this adds up to a game-changer able to revive magazine and print journalism will depend, not surprisingly, and as usual, on whether it’s innovative enough to lure consumers and advertisers into paying real money for content. At the moment, most of the news sites are both free and largely ad-free: while neither “revolutionary” nor “game-changing,” this is indeed “magical.”
One place the iPad shines is with its iBook application. Apple not only straddled Amazon’s shoulders when designing the app, it found the finest e-book application for the iPhone, called Classics, lifted its best features—a virtual bookshelf filled with the book jackets of virtual books and pages that curl and turn like paper pages—and enhanced them. Turn the iPad horizontally and the book on the screen instantly shows left and right pages. Turn it vertically and there’s a single long page. Flick the screen with your fingers and the pages fan. Flick them one at a time and you hear them turn. It’s a little cheesy—but it’s familiar, too, which makes holding and manipulating a book made of glass and metal a little less strange. Though the actual iBookstore is so far limited to less than 60,000 volumes, half of which are the public domain holdings of Project Gutenberg and the rest the thrillers, mysteries, and celebrity memoirs that top recent best-seller lists, that number will only grow as more publishers sign on with Apple, which has been much more accommodating of publishers’ interests than Amazon by letting them set prices and release dates, as well as by adopting the ePub format. (It’s still unclear how books purchased through the Google Books settlement or through Google Editions will work with iBooks.) With ePub, too, it’s also easy to retrieve free books from manybooks.net or Project Gutenberg or Google Books, as well as to download PDF files, send them to iBook, and have them appear on the iBook bookshelf ready to read. In addition, there is a stand-alone free books app.
Free books, typically, are either self-published or published before 1923 and in the public domain. Some, like Alice in Wonderland and Pride and Prejudice and the Kama Sutra, are quite popular, but for the most part, when readers seek out digital books, they are looking for titles that are contemporary, if not new. What the Kindle and the Kindle app for the iPhone/Touch demonstrated was that if the price was right, books could be an impulse buy. But immediacy—being able to push a button and having a book appear instantly on your screen—only worked if the price was low enough not to get in the way of hitting the “buy” button.
Somehow, maybe by focus group, maybe by luck, Amazon determined that the ideal price point was $9.99 and made that the sticker price for most of its titles, despite hardback prices that were often more than twice that, despite losing money on them, and despite many publishers’ belief that cheap e-books were going to cut into their bread-and-butter retail sales. For better or worse, there was a catnip quality to the $9.99 book, much the way there was for the 99-cent song. By May 2009, Kindle downloads accounted for 35 percent of Amazon’s book sales when there was a Kindle edition available,15 as the folks over at Apple were well aware, since a lot of those sales were coming through the Kindle app, not the Kindle itself.
Within days of getting into the e-bookstore business, Apple, as if to answer the question of whether higher e-book prices would put a brake on buying, anounced that 250,000 books already had been downloaded on 300,000 machines. It turns out, though, that it was fudging. By using the word “download” to describe readers’ behavior rather than “purchase,” it was not possible to distinguish between books that were added to all those new iPads without charge—free books and book samples—versus those that cost money. Whether higher prices will slow e-book sales remains to be answered. In the meantime, readers who balk at paying a premium to read books through iBooks can still buy books on the iPad using the Kindle app or one for Kobo Books, a Canadian bookseller, and in a few months through Google Editions. While their formats are not as elegant as iBooks’, it is not unusual to find a book selling for a couple of dollars less on these sites, and as soon as someone comes up with the book price comparison app, that kind of shopping will be even easier.
Of course, there’s no telling if Apple will allow such an app in its App Store, since it keeps a tight rein on what can be sold there. All software for the iPad (and iPhone and iPod Touch) goes through a lengthy vetting process and has to be approved by the company. Apple can reject software it considers too competitive with its own products, or deems inappropriate, or just does not like—it’s an arbitrary process, as shown by Apple’s rejection of an app created by political cartoonist Mark Fiore because it “ridicules public figures.”^16 This is its prerogative, and it’s not that different from publishing (editors routinely reject manuscripts) or retail (that’s why there are professional buyers).
Still, Apple’s vetting is the antithesis of the openness that has sparked much of the creativity and ingenuity that defines and drives the Internet. Since the release of the first browser seventeen years ago, the Internet has been an unrestricted playground, accessible to just about anyone. Its openness is why some governments fear it, why certain corporations are threatened by it, why a formerly unknown singer can sell a million albums, why a teenager in Mumbai can contribute computer code to a piece of software developed in Amsterdam and distributed globally.
The Open Source movement and Creative Commons both derive from the Internet’s essential freedom, a leveling that allows designers and filmmakers and singers and craftsmen and any number of writers, activists, politicians, artists, and entrepreneurs, many of them amateurs, to develop and disseminate their ideas. Imagine what the Internet, and our lives, would be like if, after inventing the Mosaic Web browser back in 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina not only required users to buy it but required payment for every click or download or page view. Try to imagine how a privatized, monetized Internet might have developed, and you can’t, because its evolutionary path would have been so different. Apple’s iPad apps may be ingenious. They may be fun and entertaining. They may be useful. What they can’t be is free of Apple’s control.
It is true that the iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, comes with a Web browser app that takes the user directly to the Internet. Arguably, this makes these devices comparable to any computer and renders the complaint about gatekeeping moot. In fact, Web browsing on the iPad is less than ideal. Keeping more than one window open at a time is not possible, and Apple’s refusal to enable Flash, a piece of proprietary software owned by Adobe Systems that underlies many websites and allows for animations and video, means that those websites are either not fully functional or not available at all. But why bother going through a browser to get to YouTube or to read the AP headlines or check the weather when there is a dedicated app for each of these? This is what is really revolutionary and game-changing about the iPad: once there is an app for everything, it’s Apple’s Web, not the wide world’s.
As many Blogger Buster readers have reported, the links to download my eBooks had become corrupted during my extended hiatus.
Today I have uploaded both The Blogger Template Book and The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger templates to Google Documents, a relocation I hope will prove far more reliable than my previous hosting solution!
I've updated the download links for these eBooks and hope everyone can now read and download these resources without any problems.
It's been a long time since these eBooks were released, so here's a quick overview of both offerings for new readers and those who may have missed the documentation upon their initial releases:
The Blogger Template Book
Choosing and using a new template for your Blogger powered blog can be quite a daunting task. What is the best method for installation? How can you choose the design and layout most suitable for your blog?
The Blogger Template Book is a free complete guide to Blogger templates, from choosing the best layout and design to suit your content, to foolproof installation methods and optimization.
The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger Templates
Originally published back in January 2008, this eBook will offer you many options and examples to customize your existing Blogger template quickly and easily, whichever style of template you are using!
Admittedly some of the techniques described in this eBook are outdated in lieu of Blogger's new Template Designer, though I hope many will still find this useful for learning the basics of Blogger template customization.
I'm currently working on a new premium eBook for Blogger users which I hope to release in the summer.
The Blogger Book will provide a comprehensive guide to using Blogger's publishing service: from initial creation through to designing custom-made templates and hosting an entire website on Blogspot, this guide will help you learn tips and techniques for developing a truly amazing Blogger-based site.
Stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed or the new email newsletter and you'll receive updates (plus sneak previews) of the forthcoming book in addition to our regular content.
A. Free Ebook Websites B. Ebook Directories: Sites That List Free Ebook Websites C. Ebook Search Sites and Ebook Search Engines D. Audiobooks E. Ebooks About Aspects of Writing, Publishing, Internet, and Epublishing F. Literature, Classic Books, Biographies G. Nonfiction Ebooks (including Science, Technology and Computer Ebooks) H. Scholarly Offerings I. Children’s Literature J. Pastore’s Picks: 1,001 Noteworthy Ebooks to Read Before You Diet
By Frank Ahrens Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 29, 2009; A11
Consumers spent a little more than anticipated during the holiday season, according to a report out on Monday, and a significant e-tail threshold may have been crossed on Christmas Day at Amazon, the online bookseller.
For the first time ever, online sales of e-books on Christmas Day exceeded sales of physical books at Amazon, the company said on Monday.
Overall, retail spending from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24 rose 3.6 percent compared with the corresponding period last year, according to MasterCard's SpendingPulse survey, which tracks all retail spending, including cash transactions.
The increase was partly attributable to one extra shopping day in 2009. Even removing that day, retail spending still beat last year's performance, when recession-dampened sales slumped 2.3 percent compared with the 2007 period.
This year's results also bested expectations, which forecast a 1 percent slump in holiday spending across November and December, compared with last year's historically bad results.
"While up is good, it wasn't going to take much" to beat 2008 holiday spending, said Miller Tabak equity strategist Peter Boockvar. "Things are better but still sluggish, and consumers are still fervently looking for sales."
Boockvar pointed to reports Monday of people returning gifts in exchange for cash to buy necessities as "a sign that the labor market and people's pocketbooks are still very uncertain."
According to government data, consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. The biggest jump in 2009 holiday retail spending happened online, where purchases rose 15.5 percent compared with last year, the survey said. They now account for about 10 percent of all retail sales.
Contributing to the online surge were electronic book purchases from Amazon, meant for use on the company's Kindle reading device.
Amazon, however, does not release sales figures on Kindle sales, nor on e-books sold on Christmas Day.
Using built-in wireless technology and an electronic display, the Kindle lets users download digitized books, blogs, magazines and newspapers in almost any location and read them on the device's six-inch screen immediately.
Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007. The peak in e-book purchases on Christmas Day indicates that a number of Kindles were given as Christmas presents and were used to buy books that day. In a release, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos called the Kindle, which sells for $259, the "most-gifted item ever in our history."
On a wider scale, the uptick in holiday spending came from electronics, jewelry and footwear, which combined to make up more than 16 percent of all sales, MasterCard said.
Sales at department stores dipped 2.3 percent, MasterCard said.
MasterCard's online sales report was backed up by data from comScore on Monday, showing that November online spending rose 10 percent measured against November last year. This year, consumers geared up for the holidays buying $12.3 billion worth of goods over the Internet.
On 2009's "Cyber Monday" -- the first business day after the Thanksgiving weekend, when a surge in online sales is typically expected -- spending rose 5 percent, with half of all sales coming from work computers, comScore said.
But on Black Friday -- the day after Thanksgiving, which is thought of as a big, brick-and-mortar retail spending day -- online spending actually rose 11 percent compared with November 2008, comScore said.
Online sales hit a one-day high of $913 million on Dec. 15, comScore reported, the first time they have topped the $900 million mark.
Monday's positive retail news pushed stocks modestly higher. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.26 percent to close at 10,547.08. The broader Standard & Poor's 500-stock index rose 0.12 percent to close at 1127.78 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index climbed 0.24 percent, reaching 2291.08.
With three days left in the trading year -- and decade -- the Dow is up 20 percent, the S&P 500 is up 25 percent and the Nasdaq is up 45 percent year-to-date.
NEWSPAPERS and novels are moving briskly from paper to pixels, but textbooks have yet to find the perfect electronic home. They are readable on laptops and smartphones, but the displays can be eye-taxing. Even dedicated e-readers with their crisp printlike displays can’t handle textbook staples like color illustrations or the videos and Web-linked supplements publishers increasingly supply.
Now there is a new approach that may adapt well to textbook pages: two-screen e-book readers with a traditional e-paper display on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other to render graphics like science animations in color.
The dual screens are linked by a central processor so that, for example, a link on the e-paper display can open on the color screen.
A two-screen device called the eDGe will be released by enTourage Systems in February for $490, said Doug Atkinson, vice president of marketing and business development for the company, based in McLean, Va.
The dual screens of the eDGe open like a book with facing pages. The e-reader screen is 9.7 inches diagonally; the color touch screen on the liquid-crystal display is 10.1 inches. The two screens interact in many ways. For instance, if the textbook on the black-and-white e-reader displays an illustration from a file that is in color, “the machine can move the illustration over to the LCD and run it there in color,” Mr. Atkinson said.
The e-reader screen is used with a stylus that can underline or highlight text, take notes in the margin, pull up a blank piece of e-paper for solving math problems, or touch a link for a video of a chemical interaction that is then displayed on the LCD screen.
The virtual keyboard is on the LCD side, as well as an audio recorder and a video camera. The device uses Google’s Android operating system, so other applications like word processing can be added, Mr. Atkinson said.
The two screens swivel, so that the LCD screen can be tucked beneath the e-reader if space is tight. Then the device can be used as a note-taking tablet, or it can be flipped over to the other side for sending e-mail.
Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., said that the enTourage device was part of the next generation of e-readers, which would be hybrids. “They won’t just be a netbook or a tablet or an e-reader,” Ms. Epps said, “but a combination that will bend the categories consumers expect from electronics.”
E-textbooks have special requirements that can be addressed by hybrids like the eDGe, she explained. “The devices have to render graphics faithfully, ideally with color,” she said, “and students should have the ability to take extensive notes and share them,” as well as have access to whatever interactive elements publishers provide.
Until such features come to market, Ms. Epps said, “electronic book readers are great for reading novels, but they aren’t right for textbooks.”
Allen Weiner, a research vice president with Gartner, said that many students would simply read e-textbooks on their laptops. But even so, dual-screen devices are likely to find a place in the market, he said, provided the models have fairly large screens for both displays. “The window you need for effective video interaction doesn’t have to be giant,” Mr. Weiner said, “but it needs to be a decent size” so that readers can click on a link and find out more. In addition, students can use the hybrids to take notes and underline text directly on the screen using the stylus, something they can’t do on most laptops.
Two other new devices also use dual screens. Barnes & Noble’s new Nook e-book reader ($259) has a small LCD touch screen beneath the reading display to be used primarily for navigation. Another device not yet on the market, the Alex from Spring Design in Cupertino, Calif., has a 3.5-inch LCD for browsing the Internet and interacting with the e-reader content. Spring Design will announce pricing in January, said Eric Kmiec, the company’s vice president for sales and marketing.
“You will probably soon see combined e-reading devices with LCDs that are slightly smaller than the enTourage, but larger than the Alex,” Mr. Weiner predicted.
Electronic textbooks may one day offer a convenient way to study, said Ms. Epps, literally lightening a student’s load. That’s already happened at Catholic University of America in Washington, where Robert A. Destro, a professor of law, and his students are testing a version of the eDGe. Professor Destro has 13 textbooks on his device.
“It’s wonderful not to have to lug those books around,” he said.
Sony Corp., hoping to steal some of Amazon.com Inc.'s thunder in the electronic-book market, unveiled a wireless reader that could be the strongest competitor to Amazon's Kindle this holiday season.
Priced at $399, the Sony Reader Daily Edition is $100 more expensive than the entry-level Kindle, but one-ups the market leader with a touch-sensitive screen and access to books from a range of sources, including libraries. Kindle users are largely limited to books from Amazon's online store.
The new Sony device also closes a critical gap with the Kindle. Unlike earlier Sony readers, it can be used to download books and periodicals using AT&T Inc.'s wireless network. The Kindle has offered similar wireless features since its debut with Sprint Nextel Corp.
The gadget, which will be in stores in December, adds to the increasing competition in the small, but fast-growing, digital book business. Although Sony was first to market with a reader, Amazon has dominated the business since introducing the Kindle in 2007.
Video: Sony's New Reader Passes "Dad Test"Now Sony and others are rolling out new e-reading devices with more sophisticated technology as increasing numbers of publishers release e-books and booksellers including Barnes & Noble Inc. open e-book stores.
Apple Inc. could further disrupt the market with a tablet device, expected to debut by early next year, that will let people read electronic books and newspapers as well as watch movies.
Sony's device works with e-books and newspapers from stores other than Sony's online store, which also gives access to free books from Google Inc.
"The point is not one device to one store," said Steve Haber, president of Sony Electronics's digital books business. "Readers can shop around for what interests them rather than be locked into one store."
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on the Sony device. Earlier this year, the company released a Kindle with a larger screen targeted at textbooks, and also reduced the price of the smaller Kindle to $299.
Sony brought out its first e-reader for the U.S. market in 2006, but analysts say it has fallen behind Amazon because it lacked the Kindle's integrated wireless bookstore. Previous Sony readers had to be plugged into a computer to download books.
The Daily Edition prototype that Sony showed off at its New York launch displayed a blank screen without any text, and the company did not make a version available for hands-on handling. In contrast, when Amazon released its newest Kindle in May, it used a working version to demonstrate features and let reporters handle prototypes.
The new device "will help Sony narrow the gap between itself and Amazon, but Amazon will maintain its market lead into next year," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst for Forrester Research Inc. She estimated that more than two million e-readers will sell in the U.S. this year.
Sony disclosed Tuesday a marketing partnership with Cleveland-based OverDrive Inc. that will let users of Sony's wireless device enter their Zip Codes and library card number to see what e-books are available from their local library; they can then download e-books remotely to the device until the loans expire.
Sony's Daily Edition can be held vertically to display one page of a book or turned horizontally so that it shows two pages, which Mr. Haber said makes it feel "more like a real book." The sample Daily Edition that Sony showed at a press event Tuesday had a blank screen.
Book publishers are counting on digital books to revive their stalled industry. Newspaper and magazine publishers, too, are hoping that dedicated reading devices will offer new venues to expand readership and collect revenue for news and information, although e-reader subscriptions remain a fraction of circulation.
Sony didn't disclose any newspaper or magazine publishers that would support the Daily Edition. "We are working with a number of newspaper and magazine publishers and will reveal more information about this closer to the time the product is available," a spokesman said.
The Sony device will give publishers their first mass-market alternative to the Kindle to sell e-reader editions of their periodicals. Publishers say Amazon keeps 70% of the revenue from sales of Kindle subscriptions for newspapers and magazines, and Amazon controls all the customer data.
Newspaper and magazine executives have said Sony is amenable to striking more favorable partnership terms, though several publishers also said Sony has been slow to reach agreements, such as whether their relationships with Sony would be exclusive.
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