The day Apple announced the iPad, Amazon was calling newspapers and publishers before Steve Jobs had even left the stage. As the New York Times’ Bits blog has it, Amazon wanted to hear what Apple had offered. Amazon had been trying for more than a month to sign deals with publishers that would give Amazon customers the best prices anywhere, either by matching or beating the prices given to other dealers.

Amazon tried to sweeten the deal by offering publishers bigger revenues than in the past. Unfortunately, Apple was willing to budge on a much larger issue: price. With Apple, publishers had a bit more flexibility than Amazon would give, which in turn gave publishers bargaining power over Amazon. See, Amazon will do just about anything to stay competitive with Apple.

In fairness to Amazon, it’s not like publishers want to upset that distribution channel. Amazon pretty much pioneered the ebook scene – it certainly made ebooks as popular as they were likely to become before some sort of wonder device came along – which leaves publishers keen to cater to the existing subscribers in Amazon’s marketplace until either the iPad gains enough ground or Amazon releases a new reader.

That last point is very important. If Amazon doesn’t release a new reader within the next year or so, it will pigeonhole itself into becoming solely a content provider, a position I wouldn’t think Bezos wants to be in considering he started the Kindle. Rarely would a company of Amazon’s scale introduce a middling product only to do away with it in a couple years.

Source: Bits

During News Corp’s quarterly earnings conference call, Rupert Murdoch finally revealed his true feelings about the deal between HarperCollins, which News Corp owns, and Amazon for ebooks in the Kindle Store. “We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….we think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books.”

That pretty much says it all. Now that the company has an option coming with the iPad, it no longer needs to succumb to Amazon’s demands. Things are just the opposite, in fact, thanks to flexible pricing options from Apple. The competition is forcing Amazon to renegotiate prices with publishers for fear of losing market share or publisher support altogether.

It’s tough to say that increased ebook prices actually preserves the value of the book, particularly after prices have been so low. Fortunately for publishers, the ebook reading population was small enough that the rest of the world might not know to care about the difference.

Kindle sales are notoriously hard to track because the company won’t talk specifics. Amazon is also becoming famous for talking about the success of the Kindle in relative terms, making it basically impossible to nail down just how well the ebook reader and the Kindle store are performing.

The most recent statement from Bezos regarding sales came shortly after the iPad announcement. He says, “millions of people now own Kindles.” That means basically nothing. The device has been around for more than two years, and as the mother-of-all ereaders for most of that time, you’d hope it has a couple million in circulation.

Here’s Bezos on the performance of the Kindle store: “When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books…This is year-to-date and includes only paid books—free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It’s been an exciting 27 months.” Again, essentially meaningless. Of course the number of ebooks to real books will be higher in the case that ebooks exist for a given text, but is that really a good thing for the industry? Ebooks are much cheaper than hardbacks and even most paperbacks at release. It seems to follow that there could be people without a Kindle that still download the goods to something like an iPhone. It’s good for Amazon but pretty terrible for publishers, who are seeing profits slide in the wake of digital content.

Add to all of this the fact that the Kindle is a purpose-built device, a dying breed gadgets that seem to have decreasing lifespans as the years wear on. The iPad with its epub format and color screen is going to make the Kindle look like yesterday’s brown bag lunch that forces you to load it down with liverwurst sandwiches (may have taken that one a bit far). No thank you.

This morning Amazon announced that it had closed the Zappos deal that had been rumored since July. Originally the online shoe retailer was valued at $928 million, but the final sale price was a whopping $1.2 billion. Yeah. With a B.

Zappos was happy to announce the news as well, stating that investors were compensated for Zappos shares with Amazon shares totaling the sale price. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh also pointed out that things will pretty much stay the same with regard to management, albeit with a few new faces around.

We’ve been spending the past few months obtaining all the proper government approvals, and I’m happy to say that we officially closed the deal at the split second between Halloween (10/31/09) and All Saints’ Day (11/1/09). From a practical point of view, we’ve switched out our previous board of directors with a new management committee that is composed of people from Zappos as well as Amazon.

All in all, a pretty good weekend to be in either camp here. For Zappos, you just got $272 million richer. For Amazon, you just picked up a company that sells a billion shoes a year. Yeah. With a B.

Amazon today quietly confirmed that it would start selling the Kindle DX in international markets in the near future. The news isn’t really a shock after the GSM Kindle announcement. As you may recall, the DX is the bigger version designed for textbooks and newspapers. It’s the model that was offered to Princeton students free of charge. The model those same students hated.

According to SlashGear, Amazon has only said “next year” with regard to a date and won’t say anything about pricing. The international Kindle 2 runs $20 above the states-only version. I’d guess the DX will be about the same, giving Princeton the unique opportunity of subsidizing $20 toward even crappier AT&T service for the rest of us. Thanks guys!