By Stephen Windwalker 

Okay, it’s all well and good that we recently passed 10,000 Kindle Nation subscribers and we were quoted (out of context, of course) this morning on Marketwatch. We’re still not above an occasional whimsical post.

The word is that there is a minor winter storm on its way toward my Arlington, MA neighborhood, so on my way back from my gym-and-swim this morning I stopped at my neighborhood packie to pick up a 12-pack of Sam Adams Light Beer.

What’s that got to do with Kindle Nation?

I don’t want to overstate the connection, but I promise, we’ll get there.

You may not have watched the Super Bowl this past weekend. Indeed, I think that a lot of Kindle owners were reading their Kindles early Sunday evening and may have missed the game, the Who, and the various multi-million dollar Super Bowl commercials. From what I have heard, we didn’t miss that much. I loved The Who in their day, but I think that day may have passed for Pete and Roger.

But it has come to my attention that reading, and specifically the very Kindle-friendly notion of book clubs, played an important role in one of Sunday’s most prominent Super Bowl commercials.

Let’s just say that the commercial wasn’t exactly respectful of book clubs, of reading, or for that matter of women. It was a commercial, after all, for Budweiser beer.

I’m not a crotchety old curmudgeon, and the only thing that bothers me about the commercial is the way it seems to celebrate stupidity. Some men are actually better than that, at least 40 percent of the time. It’s not like I’m going to start boycotting Budweiser beer as a result of one silly commercial.

The fact is that it isn’t a boycott if you just don’t care for the product.

As a reader, a Kindle owner, and a moderately intelligent person of occasionally refined tastes, I prefer a quality beer. And I may have a slight bias toward Sam Adams because its founder Jim Koch and I were college pals and are still good friends more than a few years later. He brought me a celebratory case of his then-fledgling beer company’s finest brew when I opened my brick-and-mortar bookstore in Boston 25 years ago, and Betty and I attended his 60th birthday party last summer. It was a great party with lobster and steamers and great clam chowder, but the best of it all was the beer.

And I have no doubt that if Jim’s company were to make a similar commercial they would, at the very least, be cutting-edge enough to have a Kindle show up somewhere in the 30 seconds of footage.