Amazon Kindle most popular item on online store

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader was the biggest selling product on Amazon.co.uk in the build-up to Christmas, with the online store enjoying another excellent December in terms of UK sales.

According to figures released by Amazon themselves, Monday 6th December was their busiest trading day in the pre-Christmas period with 2.3 million products sold, whilst 27 sales were made every second during the height of transactional activity ahead of 25th December.

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reading product topped their own bestsellers chart, with the Toy Story 3 DVD in second place, the Call of Duty Black Ops video game in third spot and Take That's latest comeback album Progress in fourth.

The DVD of the smash hit movie Inception was fifth in the chart, with the rest of the top 10 completed by Jamie Oliver's 30-Minute Meals book, the Now That's What I Call Music! 77 CD, Eclipse (DVD), Downton Abbey Series 1 (DVD) and Just Dance 2 (Wii game).

The Kindle device retails at just over £100 and online sales of eBooks via Amazon further strengthen the website’s already robust position in the online leisure and entertainment marketplace.

The success of the Kindle and Apple’s more versatile e-reading device the iPad – Apple reportedly sold more than 4 million of the tablet computers in Q3 of 2010 – is bringing the reading experience to a new audience in a new format.

Many classic novels are out of copyright meaning that the works of Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the likes of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll can be acquired free of charge.