A Kindle in the wild

Amazon is being very secretive about the sales of its Kindle electronic reader. Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian suggests gauging sales by spotting them in the wild. I saw a domesticated version at my sister’s house yesterday.

Johnson talked with an analyst who thinks public Kindles are a long ways off:

Even at 2.5m possible Kindles in the market, that’s less than 1 for every 100 people in the US – so while there’s a lot of room to grow, it means that very few of the people around you at any given moment are likely to be Kindle owners. Plus, given that people do most of their reading at home – only 5% of the population travels regularly for business, an obvious Kindle target customer – it’s unlikely that we’ll see Kindles reach the public visibility that iPods and their white headphones had back in 2003