I’m always fascinated how the Kindle becomes part of our every day life. And I thought it’d be fun to see how Amazon and their Kindle did (and didn’t) play a role in all of the fesitivites during Sunday’s big football showdown. There was an unexpected lull in the second half of the Super Bowl when a partial power outage stopped the game for more than half an hour. With 178 million people watching the half-darkened stadium, I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, must’ve pulled out their Kindle and just started reading!
I say this because right about that time, my friend Richard announced on Facebook that he was in fact spending some quiet time at a real bookstore — drinking coffee, and enjoying some reading. I envy the calm, quiet afternoon he must’ve enjoyed, and he added in his Facebook update that there seemed to be no one else at the store! But even if you’re not a football fan, it’s easy to be affected by the massive spectacle, knowing that it’s captured the attention of a good chunk of the world’s population. I’m impressed that so many aspiring authors cranked out football ebooks specifically targeting readers who were thinking about Sunday’s big football event.
There’s new ebooks with Super Bowl trivia questions and recipes, books about football player controversies, and over a dozen ebooks offering “numerology” analysis for individual players. There’s even a thriller about a Super Bowl referee who’s secretly being extorted by a gang of criminals. And I was intrigued that a few years ago, one author even found a way to combine the Super Bowl with American History — author Don Steinberg , with his Kindle ebook America Bowl: 44 Presidents vs. 44 Super Bowls in the ultimate matchup!. (“Each chapter compares one President to one Super Bowl game,” he explains on the book’s page on Amazon. “It’s a crazy concept…but it turns out to be a really fun way to read about history and football.”)
Of course, not every ebook about the Super Bowl will deliver championship-calibur writing, and there aren’t any ebooks about the Super Bowl that made it into Amazon’s list of the top 100 best-selling ebooks. But I thought it was cool that right in the middle of the game, Amazon posted this on their Faceboook page for digital music.
If you’re curious about which songs are playing during the game tonight, follow us on Twitter. We’ll be live-tweeting links: http://www.twitter.com/amazonmp3
So it was fun to visit Amazon’s Music Store and browse through its special web page the next day just to see how many of the songs I remembered. (For a shortcut to their complete list, just point your browser to tinyurl.com/SuperBowlSongs .) If you have a Kindle Fire, you can even watch all those ads again in your web browser at www.youtube.com/user/superbowladsman . I was a little disappointed that Amazon didn’t run an ad for the Kindle during the Super Bowl. But at least their pumped-up songs would still provide good background music for reading on the Kindle — especially for new Kindle ebooks about the Super Bowl!