What do Stephen King, Hilary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger 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, provided good publicity for the Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

Oprah Winfrey was first. As long ago as 2008 she announced that Amazon’s original Kindle was her “favorite new gadget”. She also interviewed Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, on her show and provided the Kindle with a very favourable review. Amazon’s marketing team must have been ecstatic.

Stephen King, the world’s best selling author, authored a special novella – “Ur” – to mark the release of Amazon’s second generation reader, the Kindle 2, in February 2009. The plot, without giving the story away, related to the use 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.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his role as Governor of California, introduced a program to make free digital textbooks available in Californian schools. The program, which has several stages, commenced in August of 2009. It seemed that, in the case of digital textbooks at least, the future had arrived somewhat faster than many people had anticipated. At the end of the day, if Arnie thinks that they’re a good idea who’s going to argue with him?

Also on the subject of education, the New Democratic Leadership Council, a Washington think-tank of which Hilary Clinton is a member, released a white paper entitled “A Kindle In Every Backpack”. The paper outlined the benefits of introducing e-book readers and digital textbooks into the in the U.S. education system. Although the report did acknowledge 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 fantastic publicity for Amazon.

The above examples are no more than four snapshots of the kind of exposure the Kindle reader has managed to achieve. During 2009, the Kindle attracted a huge amount of publicity, chiefly for itself but also for e-book readers as a whole. It’s easy to see how the Kindle has managed to secure a 60% share of the U.S. e-book reader market.

There are now a lot of companies with their own e-book readers on the market. Although some of these feature technical specs which, in some areas at least, outperforms the Kindle, there just doesn’t seem to be the same buzz about any of them that existed, and to a large extent still exists, around the Kindle. It really is hard to see where the Kindle Killer is coming from – unless Amazon release the Kindle 4 that is.