Amazon full of the joys of Christmas

If you spent Boxing Day watching Pirates of the Caribbean, listening to Dido's Life for Rent and cooking lunch on the George Foreman Grill while the kids played Fifa 2004 upstairs on the PlayStation 2 then it's likely you're one of the thousands of consumers who benefited from an Amazon Christmas.

On its busiest day alone Amazon.co.uk despatched more than 300,000 items ranging from CDs and DVDs to home electronics and kitchenware this Christmas and claims 99 per cent of holiday orders were shipped in time for the big day.

Amazon's best-selling booklist revealed a preference in the UK for non-fiction, with contemporary grammar bible Eats, Shoots and Leaves… topping the chart followed by Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany and two seasonal ever-presents of recent years Michael Moore and Bill Bryson.

Former heavyweight boxer George Foreman was the undisputed king of kitchenware, with his low fat grill taking up three of the top 10 chart places.

DVD players and digital cameras were the most popular items in the electronics chart in which USB storage devices for cameras and MP3 players also showed strong sales.

Also for the die-hard techie Norton anti-virus products were the third and eighth best-selling software products.

They may not be the most fun items to unwrap and play with on Christmas morning but it at least means many vulnerable users going online with a new PC over the holidays will have been better protected against a host of threats waiting to attack naïve first time surfers.

Microsoft also faired well under UK Christmas trees. Money 2004 and Office 2003 occupied fifth and sixth spot respectively in the software chart.