The Kindle itself—the actual physcial device—might get more attention than it deserves. The thing to focus on, it seems, is the Kindle format.

The evidence for this is Amazon’s announcement that it will be offering a free iPhone and iPod Kindle reader application:

Shaking up the nascent market for electronic books for the second time in two months, Amazon.com will begin selling e-books for reading on Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod Touch.

Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can download a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple’s App Store. The software will give them full access to the 240,000 e-books for sale on Amazon.com, which include a majority of best sellers. (NYT)

It’s an interesting development. As the mention of it at O’Reilly Radar notes in a headline, this is “Kindle Above the Level of a Single Device.” Amazon is willing to sell you eBooks even if you aren’t willing to buy their machine.

This could be something of a game-changer. If Amazon’s goal with the Kindle device is to promote an eBook distribution format (and also just the popularity of eBook reading in general), then they’re doing something different from what people tended to assume. The Times piece on the matter points out:

The developments also suggest that, true to his word, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, has little interest in the market for digital books. Mr. Jobs once dismissed the Kindle by saying “the whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Unlike other forms of media like music and video, which Apple sells itself to iPhone owners through its iTunes store, Apple appears to be ceding the e-books market to Amazon and other companies that offer e-book applications.

Somewhat ironically given Jobs’s comment, one of the best demonstration that people do in fact read is the popularity of book-related applications on Apple’s own iPhone, it’s the fastest growing category in the iTunes App Store.

So it makes sense that Amazon would want to get in on the action here. They want to make certain that if people are reading eBooks they are reading them in the Kindle format. That’s the first step to making certain that if people are publishing eBooks they’re publishing them it in the Kindle format.

It’s a lot more interesting a play than just selling the hardware.