It's quite difficult to fully describe the e-reading experience without letting someone hold the device, balance it their hands, turn pages and marvel at the type. With "See a Kindle in your Area", Amazon is trying to source help from its community by asking existing Kindle owners to make them, and their Kindles, available for prosective buyers to roadtest.

This is an interesting way to tap consumer evangelists and let them do the sell job for you. Normally I'd expect this kind of tactic to work best when the experience actually becomes better when more people get into it (as in, i'll recruit people because it's good for me). But I suppose there are two things at play here. One, people who have bought Kindles want to believe that they've made the right choice and at the right time (ie post-purchase_rationalization) so it helps substantiate that by being provided an opportunity to convince other people of the Kindle's merits. And two, I suppose there is actually an advantage for the Kindle-owning consumer in seeing Amazon succeed so that the book marketplace grows in content.

Either way, crowd-sourcing demonstrations of goods sold online is a neat strategy. It could be worthwhile Amazon exploring the formalisation of this member-get-member program by offering book credits if you bring someone into the fold. "Hey, wanna come over and touch my Kindle?" Mmm...

Go find a Kindle to poke: See a Kindle in Your Area