Amazon’s Top 10 Best-Selling Gadgets, and a Kindle Update

In the shopping spirit of the season, I thought it might be useful to give a quick update on what the year’s best-selling tech gadgets have been on Amazon.com, and how Amazon’s own foray into gadgets is going. Probably too late to help with your own shopping list, but nevertheless here are a couple notable items from the blogosphere:

—Forget Blu-ray players and iPhones. Wired’s blog notes that four of the top 10 best-selling electronic gadgets on Amazon this year are GPS devices from Garmin. That includes the #1 item of 2008, the Garmin nüvi 350 GPS navigator. Who needs maps anymore? (OK, I do.)

—Amazon’s own gadget, the Kindle e-book reader, is apparently sold out for Christmas, and its stock as a search term on Google spiked in October to nearly triple its level during the summer, according to TechCrunch. Google searches for the term “Kindle” have since fallen off somewhat, but remain high. The Kindle faces competition from Apple and Sony, and it will be very interesting to see what all this means for the future of books.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.