I’m sure plenty of Amazon’s moves lately are about reacting to the competition. There has certainly been a huge amount of activity with all kinds of innovative new products and services arriving amidst rapidly falling hardware prices. All of this is, of course, the sign of a healthy and growing market, one that a lot of companies (including Apple) want to get in on.

But I guess I don’t find the Amazon panic meme very convincing nor this notion that the forthcoming Apple Jesus tablet will rescue the old media industries as it vanquishes all opponents. There is certainly no evidence that Amazon is giving up on the Kindle hardware.

Go back to when Amazon first expanded its Kindle ebook universe with the iPhone app last year. As the NYT reported at the time:

In the future, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own. And you should also expect to see Kindle books on a lot more devices…“The device team has the job of making the most remarkable purpose-built reading device in the world,” Mr. Bezos said. “We are going to give the device team competition. We will make Kindle books, at the same $9.99 price points, available on the iPhone, and other mobile devices and other computing devices.”
The latest Kindle model has better support for Adobe’s PDF file format, and he said that in the future, Kindle readers would support other formats as well.

Reacting to competitors’ moves isn’t a sign of panic, particularly when it’s in line with the previously articulated strategy. It’s smart business. Apple originally prohibited third-party apps on the iPhone but changed course and now advertises those apps as one of the major attractions of the device.

The NYT article (which is here http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/jeff-bezos-kindle-books-and-readers-are-separate-businesses/) also explains why Amazon does not subsidize the cost of the Kindle or its wireless service. They are not losing money on Kindle hardware. Releasing an SDK implies they want to stay in the hardware competition race by matching some of Apple’s features. And increasing royalties on a subset of ebooks (self-published titles priced under $10) seems to be a reaction to terms they expect Apple to offer. They are trying to continue attracting good content while pressuring authors to keep prices low.

All of this is part of the beneficial give and take that benefits consumers in healthy competitive markets. If Apple’s next iPhone OS update copies some of the best features of Google’s Nexus One, will that be a sign they are abandoning the market or that they plan to compete even harder? And what to make of Google’s open app store model versus Apple’s highly-successful but closed/proprietary model?

As to the future of Apple’s tablet, if Apple continues to allow Kindle, Barnes & Noble and other ereading apps in its app store, I’m not sure how disruptive it’s going to be in the ebook market. According to all the reports, Apple is siding with big book publishers against Amazon (and against consumers) in terms of pricing. Not sure why a reader is going to opt for Apple’s much-higher-priced fare. Don’t forget that Apple gave a huge promotional push to Scrollmotion’s publishing industry-backed ereader app (with its high prices) a year ago and the app has gone nowhere.

I used to think it was impossible that Apple would boot out popular apps but their behavior in the case of Google Voice gives me pause. With federal regulators looking into that case, it’s probably less likely they would boot the other ereaders, but who knows.

Finally, we’ve heard before that Apple was going to change everything in media. Go back and re-read some of the comments around the introduction of TV and movies to the iTunes store or the arrival of AppleTV. Not much impact so far.