Ipod Blog

What do Hilary Clinton, Stephen King, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oprah Winfrey have in common? Apart from being a bit scary of course. The answer is that all of them have, at different times and in different ways, been the source of good publicity for the Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

Oprah was a fairly early adopter. As far back as 2008 she declared that Amazon’s original Kindle was her “favorite new gadget”. She also interviewed Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and founder, on her show and gave the Kindle a glowing testimonial. It was a real shot in the arm for Amazon.

Stephen King, the world’s best selling author, wrote a special novella – “Ur” – to commemorate the launch of Amazon’s second generation reader, the Kindle 2, in February 2009. The plot, without giving the story away, was centred of the Kindle itself and what happened when an English teacher bought a Kindle for himself after breaking up with his girlfriend. King read an extract from the book live on stage at the official Kindle 2 launch. More good publicity for Amazon.

As Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger initiated a program to make free electronic textbooks available in Californian schools. The program, which has several stages, was first introduced in August of 2009. It seemed that, in the case of digital textbooks at least, the future had arrived quicker than many people had anticipated. At the end of the day, if Arnie says that they’re a good idea who’s going to tell him he’s wrong?

Also on the subject of education, , released a white paper entitled “A Kindle In Every Backpack”. The paper espoused the benefits of introducing e-book readers and digital textbooks into the American system of education. Whilst the report acknowledged that other devices could be used the fact that the Kindle was not only referenced at various points within the document, but even included in the title, was great publicity for Amazon.

The above examples are no more than four snapshots of the kind of exposure the Kindle reader has managed to achieve. Over the course of 2009, the Kindle generated a great deal of publicity, mainly for itself but also for e-book readers as a whole. It’s not too hard to understand how the Kindle has managed to win a 60% share of the U.S. e-book reader market.

Currently there is no shortage of companies with their own e-book readers on the market. Whilst many of these incorporate technical specs which, in some areas at least, outperforms the Kindle, none of them seem to have created the level of excitement that existed, and to a large extent still exists, around the Kindle. It really is hard to imagine where the Kindle Killer is going to come from – unless Amazon release the Kindle 4 that is.