Amazon has officially lost the battle with publisher Macmillan. Last week, the company was at odds with the publishing house over its desire to raise the price of Kindle e-books. Well, Macmillan won and Amazon announced that it will acquiesce to Macmillan’s desire to raise the price on Macmillan e-books. Macmillan will get its wish of pricing between $12.99 to $14.99. It threatened to stop selling new books on Amazon if the company didn’t agree to the hike. Amazon typically charges $9.99 for new releases and bestsellers.

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The iPad may be grabbing all the headlines this week, but according to some accounts, the Kindle is still pulling in all the sales. TechCrunch is reporting that Amazon has officially passed the 3 million mark in terms of Kindles sold. The blog cites a source close to Amazon who provided the figure. The company made the milestone last month amidst holiday traffic.

The figure comes as a surprise to the industry since analysts were expecting Amazon to hit 2.5 million Kindles sold sometime around December…of 2010. So either this new number is off or Amazon enjoyed a very successful 2009. The company previously announced that it enjoyed record Kindle sales in November.

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The competition between Apple and Amazon appears to be fully heated. Amazon is preparing the launch of apps for the Kindle e-reader (though it’s avoiding the term apps and sticking with “active content”–much catchier) , clearly aiming at competing with the almost-here Apple tablet, which is expected to offer e-reading, multimedia and other applications.

Amazon will allow software developers to create apps, which will be made available through the Kindle store later in the year. The apps are expected to come in a variety of price formats including one-time fee apps that require under 100 kilobytes per month, subscription-based apps and small, free apps.

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The e-reader has some real holiday magic up its sleeve. Remember when you were a kid and you could just see the books waiting under the tree thinly disguised in slim, rectangular packages? Unless you were an avid reader, those packages regularly got pushed aside for the bigger, more exciting gifts that hopefully held something electronic under their crinkly, bowed grasps.

Now that the e-reader is taking over literature as we know it, the book is no longer the dullest, most obvious gift of the pack, but a sleek piece of technological innovation–a gift that kids, young and old, can actually get excited about. And sales are proving that consumers are loving it.

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It’s no secret that this is going to be a holiday season in which many an e-reader finds its way under the Christmas tree. It’s also not a secret that despite the press garnered by competitors like the B&N Nook, the Kindle is going to dominate the field thanks to prepared, established production/distribution from Amazon. So it’s no surprise that Amazon has announced that the Kindle enjoyed record sales in the month of November.

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The decision to go Kindle this holiday season has gotten even more obvious. Besides the fact that the B&N Nook won’t even make it in time for New Year’s, let alone Christmas, Amazon announced today that it has improved its reader by increasing battery life and adding a native PDF reader.

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With Barnes & Noble’s recently-officialized Nook coming in about a month, the heat is on Amazon to keep the Kindle competitive. With a variety of new features including color LCD and e-reader screens, book lending and replaceable battery, along with the advantage of physical retail locations everywhere, the Nook poses the greatest threat to the Kindle seen thus far. Toward this end, Amazon has lowered the $279 price tag of the international version of the 6-inch Kindle and dropped the Sprint-powered U.S. version. Amazon has hit customers with a random $20 rebate, meaning that the total price of their device is $259–a rather familiar figure. The international Kindle will rely on AT&Ts wireless network.

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Gadgets are getting harder to steal these days, thanks to location-tracking services and remote wipe features, but that’s not the case with Amazon’s Kindle e-readers. One owner’s horror story, recited to Ars Technica, reveals that there aren’t any options for tracking or wiping the device from afar. In some ways, it’s understandable, as Amazon’s past Big Brother tendencies made customers a little leery of control from the mothership, but for such an expensive device, it’d help to know that you’re not totally out of luck should it disappear. Alas, it seems you’ve got little choice but to get laughed at by the cops for coming in with no leads. [via Ars Technica]

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Apologizes for Kindle Flaws – We reported back on the 16th that Amazon had responded to legal pressure about cracked cases of the Amazon Kindle due to a design flaw.  At that point, Amazon had yet to make an official statement about the widespread cracks, but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has officially apologized for the errors.  Bezos stated that the flaws were a “painful mistake”, and that Amazon “deserved the criticism it received”.  Bezos’s admission of these mistakes was met with a gracious response, and fortunately any broken Kindle devices will be immediately replaced with new units.  Sometimes a bit of humility goes a long way, especially when it comes from the man on top of the organization.  [via channelweb]