JC Penney CEO: It may get worse before it gets better [FORTUNE]

Johnson also highlighted some of the improvements he is making in the stores. He announced that JC Penney had scrapped an outdated technology infrastructure and replaced it with an Oracle-based system. The new technology will allow the company to improve the in-store experience with mobile checkouts, self checkouts and tags based on RFID instead of bar codes, which would speed up purchases.

Nokia’s bad call on smartphones [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]

Nokia is losing ground despite spending $40 billion on research and development over the past decade—nearly four times what Apple spent in the same period. And Nokia clearly saw where the industry it dominated was heading. But its research effort was fragmented by internal rivalries and disconnected from the operations that actually brought phones to market.

AT&T’s new shared data plans won’t delivery ROI for most [WIRED]

AT&T is following in Verizon’s footsteps as the second major U.S. carrier to offer a single shared data plan across multiple devices. The “Mobile Share” plans, which AT&T announced on Wednesday, essentially work the same way as Verizon’s “Share Everything” plans, which were announced last month. And like Verizon’s offerings, AT&T’s plans won’t be cheap.

Memo to DOJ: Drop the Apple e-books suit [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]

If publishers, authors and consumers are at the mercy of a single retailer that controls 90% of the market and can set rock-bottom prices, we will all suffer. Choice is critical in any market, but that is particularly true in cultural markets like books. The prospect that a single firm would control access to books should give any reader pause.

Survey shows growing strength of e-books [THE NEW YORK TIMES]

For several years, consumers have been rapidly switching from print to digital for reading novels, a sign of the growing strength of the e-book for narrative, straightforward storytelling. Over all, digital books kept up their explosive growth in 2011, the survey confirmed. Publishers’ net revenue from sales of e-books more than doubled last year, reaching $2.07 billion, up from $869 million in 2010. E-books accounted for 15.5 percent of publishers’ revenues.