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Good dogs get compared to Lassie, good sports cars are put next to Corvettes, and good athletes are measured against Michael Jordan.  Now a Citigroup analyst has done Amazon the favor of comparing its Kindle to the iPod.

 Amazon Kindle

Mark Mahaney believes "the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world," according to a new report.  That may be a slight overstatement - he believes 380,000 of the book-reading devices will be sold this year, while millions of iPods are moving every few months - but the analyst's new estimate is still exactly double his old one.

According to Eric Martin, Mahaney reasoned, "Kindle could be one of the top 'gadget' gifts this holiday season."  And indeed, with grandparents weighing a noise-generating iPod against the potentially educational Kindle, he may be onto something.  Investors certainly believe so; Amazon is having a solid day on the stock market, up 9.9 percent at this point.

Then, add the possibility that one or two new versions of the Kindle could come out, and the line of e-book readers will almost certainly be operating at a Scottie Pippen-esque level.

Mahaney kept a "buy" rating on Amazon's stock, by the way.