Ads for the Kindle have been spied on the New York subway system. Here’s one such which we scraped off The Business Insider.

The publication’s Dan Frommer notes that subways are a good place to promote Kindles, and we can roger that. You can hold it in one hand while gripping a rail with the other. No one can see the book cover because there is none. And because there are no wireless signals in subway tunnels, you can’t talk on your cell phone, so you might as well do the next best thing and read.

Our relationship to Kindle is a love-hate one, Frommer says, and he lists five loves and five hates:

5 Things We Love

• It’s really good at what it’s designed for: Reading books that are mostly text.
• It’s discreet!
• Kindle-optimized Web sites are on the way.
• It’s super for traveling, with a few caveats.
• New books are cheaper on the Kindle than on paper.

5 Things We Hate

• Your book library starts from scratch.
• The design is better than the first Kindle, but still not fully thought-through.
• It’s expensive and novel, so people have an incentive to steal it!
• For something that only does one thing really well, it’s still pretty bulky.
• Old books double as living room decor.

“All in all,” says Frommer, “we’re pleased with the Kindle 2. As potential buyers, we’re hoping the price goes down soon, because we think it’s still too expensive. (Especially because we have to start our book libraries from scratch.) But we think Amazon is on the right path, and especially with new stuff like the iPhone Kindle app, is the clear leader in the nascent e-book industry.”

RC