Amazon chief Jeff Bezos made The Guardian’s MediaGuardian 100 list for the first time ever this year. Coming in at No. 12, the Amazon chief joins Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Larry Page and Steve Jobs, as one of the “most powerful people in television, radio, newspapers, magazines, digital media, media business, advertising, marketing and PR.”

In the past Bezos never made the list, because he was considered more of a retailer than a media mogul. The growth of the Kindle helped tipped the scales.

The Guardian explains how he made the list: “…with the success of the Kindle on both sides of the Atlantic, the purchase of LoveFilm and the launch of its cloud-based music service, Amazon is now indisputably one of the heavyweight digital content providers. ‘Amazon is the biggest media seller in the UK,’ said one of our panellists. ‘Just look at the difficulties being endured by high street retailers such as HMV and Waterstones. Amazon is going to be the last man standing.’”

Last summer Amazon chief Jeff Bezos told Charlie Rose that people use the Kindle to read and iPads to play video games. Since he made that statement, Barnes & Noble released the Nook Color, the retailer’s color eReader, and it turns out that people are also using the Nook Color to play video games.

In fact, the best selling apps on Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color eReader are predominantly games. From the Barnes & Noble press release: “The top five paid NOOK Apps are Angry Birds, Astraware Mahjong, Quickoffice Pro, Drawing Pad and Aces Jewel Hunt.” Four out of five are games, and not one is a book. Perhaps there is something about a color screen that lends itself to want gaming.

Interestingly, among news of new content releases in its app store, Barnes & Noble also noted that approximately half of Nook apps are $2.99 or less and also that the vast majority are priced at $5.99 or less.

Rumors have been going around about a Kindle tablet for the past couple of weeks and this week Amazon chief Jeff Bezos fueled the fire. In an interview with Consumer Reports, when asked about a Kindle tablet, he said to “stay tuned.”

Consumer Reports has more: “Bezos also signaled that any such device, should it come, is more likely to supplement than to supplant the Kindle, which he calls Amazon’s ‘purpose-built e-reading device.’”

The rumors began earlier this month when Taiwanese industry publication DigiTimes reported that Amazon placed orders with Quanta Computer, and planned to partner with E-Ink Holdings for a touchscreen tablet. According to the news story, the tablet would have an LCD touch panel display with fringe field switching technology. The device is expected to begin shipping in the second half of 2011, with the initial order pegged at between 700,000 and 800,000.

Amazon reported today that its net sales for Q1 were up 38% to $9.86 billion up from $7.13 billion in Q1 2010.

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos had this statement: “In the last 90 days, we announced Kindle with Special Offers, Kindle Library Lending, Audible audiobooks on Kindle, Appstore for Android, Amazon for Windows Phone 7, Checkout by Amazon in both Germany and the U.K., a Kindle Store in Germany, Cloud Drive, Cloud Player, and Prime Instant Video – just to call out a few of the things we’ve been working on.”

Amazon expects net sales to continue to rise in Q2. The company is predicting net sales to be between $8.85 billion and $9.65 billion, or to grow between 35% and 47% compared with second quarter 2010.

Amazon.com, Inc. announced its fourth quarter results today, counting a 36 percent rise in net sales and an eight percent increase in net income compared to the same period last year. Net sales totaled $12.95 billion for the quarter.

In addition, the company said it sold “millions of third-generation Kindles” during the quarter, keeping figures cloudy. The company did note that Kindle books are now more popular than paperbacks.

Here’s more from CEO Jeff Bezos, from the release: “We had our first $10 billion quarter, and after selling millions of third-generation Kindles with the new Pearl e-ink display during the quarter, Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com. Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected – and it’s on top of continued growth in paperback sales.”

While Jeff Bezos thinks that iPads are just for playing video games, iPad user behavior is telling a different story. As of this afternoon at 2pm ET, there are three eReader apps in the Top 20 for the App Store’s Top Free iPad Apps list.

Apple’s iBooks is No. 1, Amazon’s Kindle app is No. 8 and Barnes & Noble’s Nook app is No. 18. To be clear, this is for all free iPad apps, not just apps in the Books category. With iBooks beating out Simply Solitaire HD and Fruit Ninja HD Lite, and Kindle and iBooks beating out UNO HD, iPad users are showing that they do more than just play video games on their iPads. Or at least they download the apps with the intention to read.

News apps are also popular, with The Weather Channel app holding the No. 2 position, the CNN app holding the No. 3 position and the NYTimes for iPad app holding the No. 15 position.

iPad users also like streaming content. Netflix is the No. 6 free app and Pandora Radio is No. 10.

Amazon has reformatted its web site for the iPad. The new “Amazon Windowshop” shopping app is designed to make the Amazon.com experience better for the iPad and includes features that are responsive to the iPads touch screen.

The design is tied into Amazon’s existing fulfillment centers, so all orders are filled as they would be if you’d made an order on the Amazon website. The shopping app is now available in the App Store.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wants people to try it, He stated: “I think you’ll find it’s an amazing new way to shop Amazon’s millions of items. Same selection, same low prices, same fast delivery, same benefits of your Amazon Prime membership – just a completely new, fluid interface designed specifically for lean-back, touch screen tablets.”

Amazon’s ads seem to be coming right from the mouth of CEO Jeff Bezos. Earlier this summer, we live blogged the Amazon chief’s appearance on Charlie Rose and when he announced the $139 Kindle 3, he pointed out, “Some people spend more than that on sunglasses!”

And so goes the famous Kindle pool ad, which was parodied this week. In the interview Bezos also positioned his Kindle against the iPad saying that the main thing people are doing on iPad is playing video games, whereas the number one thing people are doing on Kindle is reading books. We should point out that since this interview you can now play video games on the Kindle.

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long busy summer for the eBook industry.

Techflash.com is reporting that Amazon Chief Jeff Bezos just sold more than a million Amazon shares.

The Amazon CEO reportedly sold the shares August 18-19, netting approximately $138 million. Bezos remains the majority shareholder in the company.

Techflash.com reports: “That brings Bezos’ Amazon stock sales this year to nearly $640 million. (Other big sales occurred in May and February.) It’s not clear what the Amazon CEO is doing with the proceeds. He has his own private investment firm Bezos Expeditions (recent investments include Doxo, which wants to eliminate paper bills, and health care startup Qliance). He’s also bankrolling his own commercial space flight project, Blue Origin, which wants to send paying customers into suborbital flight.”

This news comes as the new Kindle 3 is shipping this week.

Making an enhanced eBook or an app to go along with your book can be a great value to a reader with extra bis of information and content to enjoy, but it can also be complicated. Carla King has a piece on PBS.com breaking down the difference between the two and how to budget for such a project.

When it comes to enhanced eBooks. King recommends adding enhancements that go along nicely with the book. The piece quotes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as saying, “If it’s a book about music history, having music people can play at certain points in the book can be useful.”

Making enhanced eBooks is not an easy task. From the PBS piece: “How much does this cost in terms of time and money? It took me months to create the Ireland magazine working in InDesign and with my group who painstakingly reviewed and edited every iteration. It would have been a huge project even without the learning curve, so when Collingridge quoted $8,000 to $15,000 for enhanced e-book production, that sounded about right.”

Perhaps the large price tag is why we are seeing enhanced eBooks coming mostly from the big publishing groups. But smaller presses are not entirely out of the loop when it comes to creating rich media for their digital books as DIY app tools are beginning to emerge.

PBS reports: “For the budget-impaired, DIY app builders are emerging. Travel guidebook publishers already know their audience is looking online and to apps instead of to the paper book. For them, Sutro Media has created a browser-based tool to let publishers upload material to a content management system, which then gets ported into Objective C on the back end. Co-founder Kevin Collins says, ‘these apps do things that books can’t possibly do. For example, you can use all the photos you had to leave out in their book versions, and include live maps and hyperlinks, too.’”