Bob Tedeschi reports in this morning's New York Times that "the Internet continues to be more of a gift-buying medium than an everyday shopping vehicle." Among other things, the selection of goods available is so much better.

While the idea that the Internet offers greater selection than offline stores seems self-evident by now, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been able to quantify the phenomenon. For example, Professor Brynjolfsson said the number of book titles available at Amazon.com was more than 23 times greater than the number at a typical Barnes & Noble superstore, and 57 times greater than the number of books available at a typical independent bookstore.

It's not just that -- I did all my shopping on Amazon this season after spending an afternoon trying to park and shop at one of the huge local malls two weeks before Christmas. What a disaster that was.

Marsha Stopa reports on the debit vs. credit card at POS debate.

"The whole thing is very disturbing because Visa and MasterCard are owned by banks," said Scott Horsburgh, chief investment officer with investment manager Seger-Elvekrog Inc. in Bloomfield Hills. Horsburgh's stock research specialty for many years has been the electronic payments industry. "Consumers would settle this in a second if they knew all the facts. The consumer is the one who pays or gives up rights," Horsburgh said. "Let people make their own decision. This is a consumer issue and the consumer doesn't know that."

The topic of micropayments springs up again on Slashdot. Separately, Reuters reports on survey conducted by Jupiter Research that said Internet users' reluctance to pay for online content, ranging from music downloads to news articles, dropped from 47% in 2001 to 41% last year. Not exactly what I'd call an upsurge in interest!

Cleveland-based Charter One Bank has one of the most comprehensive alert services that I've seen. Check it out using the link in the right sidebar on this page.

According to the eSpending Report from Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive, and Nielsen/NetRatings, online spending during the eight week period from November 2 to December 27 jumped more than 24 percent year-over-year to $13.7 billion, up from $11 billion spent in 2001. Including travel, online spending grew nearly 22 percent to $15.7 billion.

The top two fastest growing categories for the season were toys and video games and consumer electronics, with shoppers increasing spending for both categories by more than 72 percent. With nearly $2 billion in sales, consumer electronics claimed the No. 4 ranking among shopping categories, while toys and games posted online spending of more than $1.8 billion.

Playing with the numbers, this survey estimated $3.1 billion in book sales during this eight week period. If I'm doing the math correctly (assuming an average book costs $25), that's on average about 25.7 books being sold every second during that eight week period. Earlier, Amazon reported that on its peak day (December 9th) it processed orders for 20 items/second (all items, not just books).