What do Stephen King, Hilary Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oprah Winfrey have in common? Apart from being a bit scary of course. The answer is that they have all, 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 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. Amazon’s marketing team must have been ecstatic.

Worl best selling author, Stephen King, wrote a special novella – “Ur” – to mark the release of Amazon’s updated 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 launch of the Kindle 2. 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, was first introduced in August of 2009. It appeared that, in the case of digital textbooks at least, the future had arrived quicker than many people expected it to. 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 electronic books and e-book readers into the in the U.S. education system. Whilst the report acknowledged that other devices could be employed 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 benefited from. During 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 achieve a 60% share of the e-book reader market in America.

There are now a lot of companies with their own e-book readers on on offer. Whilst many of these include technical specs which, in some areas at least, outperforms Amazon’s 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 difficult to imagine where the Kindle Killer is going to come from – unless it’s the next Kindle upgrade itself of course.