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Last week I blogged about how the Kindle has reached “a tipping point” now that it’s priced at $189. Yesterday Amazon went even further by introducing a new, enhanced Kindle priced at $139 for the wifi version and $189 for 3G.

(Further, but not far enough to trigger my $99 price point. I’ll just sit over here out of the way and wait a bit longer. It’ll happen eventually.)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also predicted that “Kindle books will outsell paperbacks at Amazon sometime in the next nine to twelve months.” Last week, when he said eBooks were outselling hardbacks, I swore they wouldn’t overtake paperbacks any time soon.

Yesterday Amazon crowed that the Kindle has reached a “tipping point”:

“We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle — the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books — astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”

The actual numbers Bezos is quoting are as follows:

“Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.”

The NY Times gets all Agent Smithy and says that is the sound of inevitability:

“Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. ‘This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,’ he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.”

Not so fast. Nobody’s talking about paperbacks here, just hardbacks. If hardbacks were priced a bit more sanely, this discussion wouldn’t even be happening.

TechCrunch tidily sums up today’s iPhone media event:

“Let’s recap: Jobs acknowledged the ["Antennagate"] problem, then offered evidence that people don’t really care because the phones are still selling like hot cakes. Not only that, but other phones have the exact same problem. And it only affects less than one percent of all iPhone 4s anyway. Still, we love our customers so much we are giving them all free cases. Any questions?”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the San Mateo County D.A.’s office has withdrawn its warrant in the case of the lost/stolen/Lord-knows-what iPhone 4 prototype. Gizmodo’s Jason Chen will get his seized computer stuff back, but it could be subpoenaed at a later date.

On Friday U.S. District Court Justice Nancy Gertner took a page from the Jammie Thomas file-sharing case and reduced the penalty in the Joel Tenenbaum case from $675,00 to $67,500. It appears now that the de facto acceptable damages award is $2,250 per song.

Let us devoutly hope that Tenenbaum’s case doesn’t keep coming back from the dead like Thomas’.

Speaking of which, Ars Technica says the judge slashed the award, as does the Boston Globe (as well as a host of others), while Wired goes for broke and says she gutted it. I’m assuming this is a manifestation of the authors’ unconscious feelings towards the Recording Industry Association of America.

Consumer Reports has decided that it cannot recommend the iPhone 4 because of its well-known signal woes. But CR Labs has come up with what they call an “affordable” fix:

“Cover the antenna gap with a piece of duct tape or another thick, non-conductive material. It may not be pretty, but it works.”

Am I gonna pay 300 bucks for an obelisk and then stick gray tape on it, which will get all grimy with lint from my pocket? Mais non. I’d wait for Plan B. (And it ain’t this.)

Link via Lifehacker.

This chart says it all: AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo aren’t capturing eyeballs the way they used to. AOL’s share of people’s online time is down 6% over the past 4 years, Yahoo has lost 4% and Microsoft is at -2%. Over the same time period, Google is up 8% and Facebook 9%.

AOL knows what it wants to become when it grows up, but it’s still failing. Yahoo? It doesn’t appear to have a clue.