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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.

After a 3-month hiatus, Google has resurrected google.cn. It only offers music search and text translation, but does sport a big honking link to Google Hong Kong. Six of one, half a dozen of the other as far as I’m concerned, but TechCrunch says Google “flinched“.

The Supreme Court upheld the Fed Circuit in denying patent protection for the Bilski energy hedging business method, but they didn’t, as many people hoped, rule on business method patents as a whole. The NY Times says they stuck to the “middle ground“. (Amazon can finally exhale on this one.)

Dell sold almost 12 million computers from 2003-2005 that they knew were junk. The problem was bad capacitors on the motherboard. The Times says this epitomizes the “decline of one of America’s most celebrated and admired companies“.

Faced with the iPad juggernaut and a dual threat from Google (Android Kindle app and the upcoming Web-based bookstore), eReader manufacturers have done the only sensible thing they could do — they’ve lowered the price. Barnes & Noble’s Nook is now $149 for the wifi-only version; Amazon’s Kindle has dropped to $189.

I say make it $99 and we’ll talk.

Even so, we’re gonna pay, one way or another. The price of the reader may come down, but the price of the books will go up. It’s the iPod/iTunes model. And we’re already seeing it.

Btw, Om Malik thinks Amazon’s gonna win the eBook wars. I have to agree.

Amazon tells me that they’re going to introduce a Kindle app for Android Real Soon Now. That’s great news, but they’re being a bit coy about whether it will actually run on my G1. They say it “supports Droid Incredible, Google Nexus One, HTC MyTouch, Motorola CLIQ, Motorola Droid, and many more Android phones.” The MyTouch isn’t all that much different that the G1, but who knows?

(Thank you, Google, for punishing us early-adopters. That would be, oh, about 2/3 of your Android users. At least I didn’t let Google sucker me into an overpriced phone they won’t support after 5 months.)

OK, rant over.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how the Kindle app will stack up against Google’s browser-based bookstore, Google Editions, which also enjoys Real Soon Now status.

Item the Firsteth: The WSJ reports that on Monday privacy ministers from 10 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the UK — sent Google a letter smacking the search giant around for its “disappointing disregard for fundamental privacy norms and laws.” The letter cited the ill-advised launch of Google Buzz, as well as issues with Google Street View. The letter calls on Google to “incorporate fundamental privacy principles directly into the design of new online services” by:

• Collecting and processing only the minimum amount of personal information necessary to achieve the identified purpose of the product or service
• Providing clear and unambiguous information about how personal information will be used to allow users to provide informed consent
• Creating privacy-protective default settings
• Ensuring that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use
• Ensuring that all personal data is adequately protected
• Giving people simple procedures for deleting their accounts and honoring their requests in a timely way

(This is not the first time that European countries have clashed with Google over privacy issues. You may remember that back in September 2008 Google announced that it would anonymize search data after 9 months because of EU prodding.)

Anyway, these principles look good on paper, but I can’t see how they’d protect you if the Google Mapsmobile comes down your street and photographs you in your skivvies. And let’s hope that whatever privacy controls Google is forced to implement work a lot better than Facebook’s.

If you have a sub, here are links to the WSJ article and a PDF of the letter.

Item the Secondeth: While we’re talkin’ Google, today the search giant released a government requests tracking tool revealing that Uncle Sam made 3,580 data requests during the last 6 months of 2009. Only Brazil tops us. (Link via Wired.)

Item the Thirdth: Amazon.com has sued the North Carolina Department of Revenue to block its demand to turn over information on about 50 million transactions from 2003-2010. Amazon has no physical presence in NC, so they don’t have to charge the 5.75% state tax. However, NC has a “use tax” that they want to enforce, hence the desire to get full customer data on NC Amazon customers.

Can someone please parse the logic of this quote for me?

“A spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Revenue said she would have to review the lawsuit before answering why the tax agency needed Amazon customer information. ‘Any comment at this time would be premature,’ Beth Stevenson said in an e-mail message.”

I mean, you knew why you wanted the data in the first place, right? Helloooooo?

The USPTO has concluded its reexamination of Amazon’s “1-Click” patent and has confirmed it:

“As amended, claims 1 and 11 now positively recite ‘a shopping cart model’.”

(Dramatic, huh?)

Anyway, Amazon isn’t out of the woods on this one yet. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Bilski case, which concerns whether business methods can be patented. If the court rules against them, 1-Click could be toast anyway.

You may remember that last summer Amazon remotely deleted 2 ebooks from customers’ Kindles. It riled up a bunch or people and ultimately cost the company a ton of goodwill, plus 150 grand.

Well, now they’re at it again. The NY Times reports that Amazon has removed books published by Macmillan from its online bookstore due to a dispute with the publisher over the price of its ebooks. Macmillan wants the price to be bumped up to $15 from the current $9.99.

The Times says that Amazon’s only giving Macmillan a temporary trip to the penalty box to express its “strong disagreement”. No word on whether this is a two-minute minor or a five-minute major. (That’s hockey talk for nobody knows how long the penalty will last.) But even if it’s a short trip, it still hurts a lot of people, especially authors such as Cory Doctorow:

“When I woke this morning at 5AM UK time, I discovered an in-box full of emails from people asking if I knew what was going on with Amazon. My books — and all books from Macmillan and its many divisions, including Tor, my publisher — had disappeared from the Amazon webstore in both physical and electronic editions.”

It’s no coincidence that this issue has come to a head now. The iPad is gonna rock Amazon’s world, so they have to protect themselves. Sez the Times:

“Apple will allow publishers more leeway to set their own prices for e-books. Although the prices will be tethered to print book prices by a formula that will generally yield prices between $12.99 and $14.99 for most fiction and general nonfiction, that is significantly higher than $9.99 discount that Amazon offers on its Kindle.”

The best way to sum up this post is to simply quote the first comment on Doctorow’s post, by Avram Grumer:

“When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. — Kikuyu proverb”

UPDATE, January 31: Amazon acknowledges that it “will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”