By Staff Writer – John Federico (@gadgetboy)

Need more evidence that Amazon is gearing up for the Apple Tablet onslaught? Here you go.

Today, Amazon announced major changes to the royalty program for what it calls its “Kindle Digital Text Platform.” Starting June 30, 2010, publishers and authors will receive 70% of the revenue for each eBook sold.

That’s a big change from the current structure. In fact, that’s probably the inverse of the current structure, if not close to it.

But, like anything else, there are gotchas. You’ve got to play by Amazon’s rules and meet some specific criteria. First, delivery costs will now be paid by the publisher:

Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

That’s actually less sticky than the rest of Amazon’s criteria:

• The list price of an ebook must be between $2.99 and $9.99
• This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book
• The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights
• The title must allow features such as text-to-speech, among other features, the list of which will grow over time.
• Books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. (How you determine “parity” on a unique work is another discussion altogether.)

The program will NOT be offered for books that are in the public domain (published before 1923) so all of you folks peddling your digital copies of “Think and Grow Rich” or “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” are out of luck.

This announcement is big for many reasons:

• It further cements the unofficially-official $9.99 price point for eBooks that has Big Publishings knickers in a bunch. Hopefully they will be satisfied with the new revenue share.
• It dictates the cost of the books physical equivalent. So now, not only is Amazon dictating the floor and ceiling for ebooks, but also for the dead tree editions.
• It ensures that the publisher will secure audio rights for the ebook, no longer allowing publishers to declare that the creepy electronic voice that reads to you a completely new work. Of course, you’ll still want to get the audio book if you intend to listen to the entire book.

I can’t wait to see how Big Publishing reacts.

[BusinessWire]

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Tags: Amazon , Amazon Kindle , Amazon.com , Apple , Author , Book Publishers , Book Publishing , Digital Books , Digital Media , E-book , eBook Reader , eReader , Kindle , Premium Content , Printed Books , publishing , Publishing and Printing , Publishing Royalties , Speech synthesis