Ebook readers represent a budding market, with many companies building devices capable of displaying books, magazines and newspapers in a user friendly, digital format.

While Amazon is currently leading the pack with the Kindle (with hundreds of thousands of books available for the platform via their online store) stiff competition is sure to follow. Sony, Barnes & Noble, Elonex, Foxit and dozens of other companies are developing their own devices; there was even an entire section dedicated to ebooks for the first time at this year’s CES in Las Vegas.

With this growing competition, in what is still a niche market, and rumours that Apple’s fabled Tablet will function, in part, as an ebook reader, Amazon have announced a number of interesting changes and updates to their Kindle formula over the last few days.

New revenue sharing policy

Yesterday, the company announced a new revenue sharing option to authors and publishers. The revised revenue sharing policy will see authors and publishers who make use of Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) increase their share of revenues from Amazon sales to as much as 70%.

Naturally, there are some conditions attached to their new policy including the fact that only books priced between $2.99 and $9.99 will be eligible for the 70% royalty option.

"Today, authors often receive royalties in the range of 7 to 15 percent of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25 percent of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. "We're excited that the new 70 percent royalty option for the Kindle Digital Text Platform will help us pay authors higher royalties when readers choose their books."

The 70% royalty option will be available from 30 June 2010.

SDK released

The company also announced this morning that it will release a software development kit for the Kindle. The kit will allow developers to create what Amazon is calling “Active Content” for the Kindle.

These ‘applications’ will be similar to the type of apps we’ve seen developed for smartphones like the iPhone, but will obviously be restricted by the limitations of the Kindle’s E ink display. Potential apps include things like real-time weather updates, games like Sudoku or crossword puzzles and interactive books.

Active Content will be made available via the Amazon store later this year. The Kindle Development Kit includes sample code, documentation, and the Kindle Simulator, which helps developers build and test their content by simulating the 6-inch Kindle and 9.7-inch Kindle DX on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops.

"We've heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle," said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "The Kindle Development Kit opens many possibilities--we look forward to being surprised by what developers invent."