Kindle, take me away!

People who own a Kindle can read it in bed, just like they would a regular book. But the bath? Not advisable to take electronic readers into the water. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says he's found a solution, telling the New York Times' Deborah Solomon that he slips his Kindle into a plastic Ziploc bag before getting into the tub.

Here's what Bezos told the Times:

What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub?
I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.

What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub?
If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know.

Is he joking? Amazon has already taken some flack over cracked Kindle screens. Will they get people complaining about waterlogged readers?

Elsewhere in the Q&A, Bezos says for every 100 physical books Amazon sells, if there's a Kindle edition, the company sells 48 Kindle versions.

"It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books. It’s astonishing," he tells the Times.

In other words, Kindle is no bubble.

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About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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