Mike Pfeffer, a 26-year-old I.T. professional, was thinking about buying a Kindle, Amazon's pricey new digital book reader, but he wanted to look at the screen and touch the buttons before shelling out $359 for it.

So he went to the Amazon site and, through the See a Kindle in Your City message board, found a current Kindle owner in Manhattan who was willing to meet up. The woman worked in the building across the street from him and enthusiastically showed him everything from how the screen looked to how to turn pages on the device.

"I told her she should go work for Amazon," says Pfeffer, who wound up buying a Kindle the very next day.

To help sell its high-priced digital reading device, Amazon is relying more than ever on its tried-and-true sales strategies of word of mouth and customer reviews, and it appears to be working, although the total market for the device is questionable. In August, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney projected that Amazon would sell 380,000 Kindles this year, up from an earlier estimate of 190,000, adding in a report that "Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world" since its release in November 2007 (however, Mahaney's estimate, based on a TechCrunch article that said 240,000 Kindles have been sold so far this year, was, by his own admission, based on fuzzy numbers. Amazon hasn't released any sales numbers for the Kindle, and has reportedly sought to distance itself from those numbers). Another analyst, Tim Bueneman from McAdams Wright Ragen, reported last week that several new versions of the device are in development, including a textbook model.

Amazon says its approach to selling the Kindle—no outside advertising and just relying on the Kindle community and stumping by Jeff Bezos to drive sales—is deliberate. The Kindle currently has over 4,200 customer reviews on the Amazon website, more than for any other top-selling item in Amazon's electronics category, and the vast majority are positive.

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"Customer reviews of Kindle have been terrific—that tends to help sell the product," says Ian Freed, the Amazon executive in charge of the Kindle. More than three quarters of the reviewers give the Kindle at least four stars out of five, with many using words like fabulous, must-have, and changed my life. 

The See a Kindle in Your City program, which was started in May, is just another extension of that idea. Freed and members of his group saw that people were especially curious when they saw one in public and decided to capitalize on the phenomenon. "We tapped right into that, allowing customers to create a space where potential customers could physically meet, like at a coffee shop or a restaurant, and show each other Kindles," says Freed. Since the Kindle is an expensive new technology, selling the device at retail outlets where customers could see and touch it would seem to make sense, but Freed says that would diminish the community-based marketing that's propelling sales. But there may be another reason for See a Kindle in Your City—it could be that stores just don't want to carry the device.