• The Chicago Tribune, Monday, April 7, 2008 12:30 PM

Sears has quietly added more than 250,000 music offerings, movies and video games to Sears.com in the past few months. It has opened an online software boutique for downloading programs for taxes, graphics, finances and computer security. And later this spring, it plans to sell books online for the first time. The store that pioneered America's mail-order business more than a century ago is turning its Web site into a shopping gateway that could soon rival its legendary Big Book.

The expansion comes as the retailer, struggling in its bricks and mortar business, took the significant step in January of breaking its Internet operations into a stand-alone business unit, hiring former Microsoft Corp. shopping portal executive Jim Barr to run it.

The number of people who visited Sears.com and Kmart.com at least once in February rose 20%, to 14.7 million, from the same period last year. That makes Sears' Web business the second-fastest-growing site among mass merchants, after Costco at 23%, according to Nielsen Online.

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