Amazon Announces Oprah Book Club on the Kindle

While the headline above may not be true now, if I worked on the Kindle team at Amazon, I'd be running around figuring out who I had to kill, bribe, or screw to get some kind of cross-promotion going with Oprah.

The woman is, quite simply, the Queen of Reading in America. In an era of declining interest in reading across all demographic groups, an endorsement from Oprah's Book Club — and the TV episode airing to 26 million viewers that goes along with it — is worth a "minimum of 500,000 additional sales" (and about $5 million in revenue) according to a Time Magazine article about the club.

Here's the promotion I'd want to see: a simple segment where Bezos goes on and explains what the Kindle is, why it's so great, his dreams for its future. Then (and this is the key), Oprah and Jeff announce that, for a limited time, Oprah viewers who buy a Kindle from Amazon will get digital copies of all future Book Club books delivered directly to their device for free. A discount on the device's steep $400 price tag and a significantly pre-Christmas announcement wouldn't hurt either.