The Kindle game is up, and Amazon knows it. In 2010, the world plus dog will be hawking an E-Ink-based e-reader, and major distribution and publishing houses like Barnes & Noble, Google, and Hearst will be offering their digital content on everything with a screen. That's why Amazon gave up some royalty money to e-book publishers on Wednesday, and announced a SDK and app store for the Kindle on Thursday.

The former move makes the Kindle Store more attractive to publishers, who will soon have plenty of options for putting their content on e-readers, E-Ink or otherwise. And the latter move will keep the Kindle e-reader fresh and attractive long after Amazon joins Apple at Wednesday's iSlate launch to announce that the Kindle Store is coming to Apple's new tablet, and to every other smartphone and tablet on the market. Forget about Amazon launching its own tablet—this year, the Kindle Store will be everywhere.

The Kindle hardware gets an SDK and a fighting chance

"Amazon announced that it is inviting software developers to build and upload active content that will be available in the Kindle Store later this year," the company said in a press release on Thursday. "The new Kindle Development Kit gives developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content for Kindle."

As examples of "active content," Amazon mentions word games, restaurant guides, and puzzles. EA Mobile, the division of Electronic Arts that does games for smartphones, is jumping on-board, but it's not clear what they have in mind for the platform. ("You're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"?)

The fact that EA Mobile is involved has led some to speculate that Amazon will announce a non-E-Ink-based, tablet-style device that can accomodate video and will compete with Apple's upcoming iSlate. Specifically, the WSJ report on the announcement includes speculation from a Forrester analyst that Amazon is readying an iSlate competitor.

This is extremely unlikely for two reasons: 1) an Amazon-branded media tablet would be just one of a number of Wi-Fi-only tablets that are launching this year, and 2) Barnes & Noble's e-book store will be on everything with a screen by the end of the year, so Amazon will end up following suit by rolling out the Kindle store to all of the aforementioned tablets, including Apple's iSlate.

But before I elaborate, let's be clear on one thing: the Kindle Developer Kit announcement is quite explicit that Amazon is planning app store for the existing Kindle:

The Kindle Development Kit enables developers to build active content that leverages Kindle's unique combination of seamless and invisible 3G wireless delivery over Amazon Whispernet, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, and long battery life of seven days with wireless activated.

So at some point soon, the Kindle will get apps that are designed specifically for the existing, E-Ink-based hardware.

And the Kindle is just the first such E-Ink device to get an app store. There will be others, because the hardware race that's going on in e-reader application processors will ensure that there's plenty of computing horsepower to push the software on these devices quite a bit further.

An Amazon tablet would be a me-too, Wi-Fi-only device

Before talking about why Amazon will launch an iSlate Kindle Store, let's talk about why they won't put out a competing tablet of their own.

When the Kindle launched, a huge part of its success was that you don't have to sign a wireless service contract with it. Whispernet's bandwidth is pre-paid and all-you-can-eat.

This pricing model will continue to work on the current Kindle even after it gets an app store, because the E-Ink display's combination of low resolution and glacial refresh rate ensures that the bandwidth load that any app can put on Whispernet will remain very low. Sprint and Amazon have no worries that Kindle games will suck up Whispernet bandwidth, because the display essentially acts as a giant bandwidth bottleneck. So Whispernet's all-you-can-eat model is safe.

This would not be true of an Amazon-branded tablet. An Amazon media tablet would have to either rely on Wi-Fi, or come with a more traditional 3G service bundle that would severely limit its appeal. And given that it would be a media device, the price of 3G bandwidth for it would be high.

So, an Amazon tablet would be yet another large-screen, Wi-Fi-based, portable media player, of the type that everyone and their uncle is bringing to market this year. And unless Amazon has a skunkworks tablet OS project that can compete with whatever Apple will put on the iSlate, the company will be stuck using a Linux or Windows flavor, just like all of the other tablet vendors (e.g., HP, Dell, and Lenovo on Windows 7, or any number of Chinese OEMs on Android) who have established hardware brands and way more experience in tweaking existing software to make an integrated device.

The only way to differentiate such an otherwise generic tablet would be for Amazon to make it the exclusive platform for the Kindle Store. The reason that such a thing won't happen brings me to my next point.

B&N and Google Books are on everything, so Amazon will follow

At CES, every random E-Ink reader company had a big sign up advertising that Barnes & Noble and Google Books are available on their platform. Hearst is doing a similar thing with its Skiff project, where the Skiff-branded reader will be but one way to access Skiff content. These media powerhouses will be joined by an army of small, "social publishing" startups like Scribd, FastPencil, Copia, etc., all of whom want their content store to be on as many platforms as possible.

As the company's somewhat rudimentary iPhone Kindle app shows, Amazon will eventually put its Kindle store on everything with a screen. Either that, or Amazon will be left hawking a me-too tablet to a customer base that is migrating to Barnes & Noble and other distributors and publishers. Given that Amazon just bought e-book reader software maker Lexcycle, it's much more likely that the company plans to put the coders to work on bringing the Kindle Store to many different smartphones and tablets that it is that they'll launch their own tablet.

The end result is that this Kindle Developer Kit announcement is way to keep the Kindle hardware fresh and relevant while Amazon pursues opportunities in the media tablet market that will take off this year.

The only way that Amazon doesn't end up on iSlate is if Apple locks them out so that it can have the content market on the device all to itself. That's within the realm of possibility, but Amazon will still put the Kindle Store on competing Windows 7 and Linux tablets, better enabling the latter to compete against Apple.

Ultimately, the Kindle has done its job for Amazon, so it's time to move on. E-Ink is no longer the novelty it once was, and publishers are looking to reach as many devices with their content as possible. Amazon's recent decision to give up more Kindle revenue to publishers is a recognition of the fact that its vise grip on them is now broken. In 2010, publishers have alternatives, and Amazon's Kindle platform, as huge and important as it was, is no longer calling the shots.