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What do Hilary Clinton, Stephen King, Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger have in common? Apart from the ability to scare you on occasion that is. The answer is that they have all, in different ways, been the source of good publicity for Amazon’s Kindle reader.

Oprah was a fairly early adopter. As long ago as 2008 she announced that the 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.

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

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his role as Governor of California, initiated a program to make free digital 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 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 tell him he’s wrong?

Also on the subject of education, , released a white paper entitled “A Kindle In Every Backpack”. The paper outlined the benefits of introducing electronic books and e-book readers into the American system of education. 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.

These are just four examples of the kind of exposure the Kindle reader has managed to achieve. During 2009, the Kindle attracted a huge amount of publicity, primarily 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. Whilst many of these include 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 difficult to see where the Kindle Killer is coming from – unless it’s the next Kindle upgrade itself of course.