Fortune magazine gave Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com, Inc. front-cover treatment this week--comparing Amazon's Kindle aspirations to Apple's iPod revolution.

While citing a Citigroup report that estimated Kindle sales had neared 500,000 units, the article notes that Apple "shipped more than 200 million iPods." Nevertheless, many experts thought the bookseller could make a mint with the digital reader. Reading the same article, e-book champion Mike Cane wondered what kind of e-reader Hewlett-Packard is developing.

Here are more details from the Fortune article: "[M]ost company watchers think that Bezos is positioned to make a fortune on the device. Barclays Capital predicts Kindle devices will produce $840 million in profit on $3.7 billion in sales in 2012. That's roughly 20% of Amazon's total sales and profit today."