E-book sellers make merry this Christmas!

Consumers spent a little more than anticipated during the holiday season, and a significant e-tail threshold may have been crossed on Christmas Day at Amazon, the online bookseller.

Consumers spent a little more than anticipated during the holiday season, according to a report Monday, and a significant e-tail threshold may have been crossed on Christmas Day at Amazon, the online bookseller.

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For the first time ever, online sales of e-books on Christmas Day exceeded sales of physical books at Amazon, the company said Monday.

Over all, 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 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. GDP.

The biggest jump in 2009 holiday retail spending happened online, where purchases rose 15.5 per cent 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.