Maneuvering to get around taxes isn’t unique to Amazon — note Apple’s own practice of keeping billions of dollars of profits offshore. The Fortune story makes it clear, though, that Amazon’s greatest advantage in the fight over collecting sales taxes has been its ability to adapt quickly to changes in the law — even if it’s simultaneously fighting those changes aggressively. When things don’t go its way, Elkind notes, “Amazon has shrewdly and successfully maneuvered to turn each development, good or bad, to its own advantage.” Part of this strategy simply means “going to extreme lengths — demanding, wheedling, suing, threatening, and negotiating — to avoid collecting for as long as possible, in as many states as possible.”

When Amazon is forced into collecting sales tax, though, it has been able to turn that into an advantage by “maneuvering to combine its needs (more warehouses) with its wants (preserving tax-free shopping for as long as possible).”

For instance, forced into collecting sales tax in South Carolina in 2010, Amazon “offered a compromise: It would start capturing sales tax in January 2016—almost five years later.” The South Carolina House rejected the compromise, and Amazon said it would leave the state and its “half-built warehouse.” Paul Misener, Amazon’s VP of global public policy, stated at a press conference, “The 1,200 jobs and nearly $100 million in capital investment that were coming to the state — aren’t.”

The House changed its mind three weeks later and Amazon will not collect sales tax in South Carolina until 2016. More recently, the retailer enacted a similar strategy in Texas, but there it was also able to secure a write-off of its own state tax bill. In addition, it will benefit from a “rebate” on the sales taxes collected in the suburbs where its warehouses are located. “This bonanza,” Elkind notes, “would run well into the millions.”

By 2016, Amazon will actually be collecting taxes from 17 states, representing about half the U.S. population, and it’s agreed to collect sales taxes in every state where it has a warehouse. And the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would force large online merchants to collect sales tax on behalf of other states, recently passed the Senate. Amazon, which has long said it supports a federal solution for online taxes, supports the Marketplace Fairness Act.

Amazon also argues that its insistence on a federal solution is a matter of principle. Misener testified in Congress last year that “far from an e-commerce loophole, the constitutional limitation on states’ authority to collect sales tax is at the core of our nation’s founding principles.” He told Fortune, “We feel very good about our position because it’s a constitutional right.”

The full Fortune article is only available online to paying subscribers, meaning you may have to pick up a print copy. It’s well worth a read over the long weekend.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

The claims are set out, in part, in a letter last week from Apple’s law firm that urges US District Judge Denise Cote to reveal information about its pricing as well as “internal discussions about the inferiority” of its Kindle e-reader compared to the iPad. Apple also says the redacted information will help expose the “fiction” that Amazon was “forced” to adopt a new pricing system as a result of a 2010 arrangement between Apple and five big publishers.

This arrangement — known as “agency pricing” — resulted in publishers requiring retailers to sell ebooks on a commission basis, in which publishers could set the price. This led the Department of Justice, state governments and class action lawyers to sue Apple and the publishers; the latter settled the cases and agreed to pay out millions but Apple is holding its ground.

Apple argues that the Department of Justice is wrong to portray Amazon as a victim, along with consumers, of a conspiracy to raise prices. Instead, the company claims that Amazon was contemplating agency pricing too and was pleasantly surprised when the publishers took it up on their own. Apple is also using colorful emails obtained from Amazon executives to make its point:

 ”I guess what we never figured in was the idea that five publishers would band together and insist on receiving worse terms,” the email said. “And then Amzn would be ‘cornered’ into accepting them.”

“Hysterical, isn’t it?” the Amazon executive replied. “Jedi Mind Tricks here in Seattle.”

The email exchange was reported by Reuters legal reporter, Alison Frankel, whose recent analysis portrayed Amazon as the “elephant in the (court)room.” Her report adds that Judge Cote stated that she doesn’t want the trial “distorted by a larger battle between two commercial giants.”

What do others think? Apple’s view is likely to find support in at least some quarters. The publishing community continues to fume about Amazon’s enormous clout in the book business. Meanwhile, some copyright lawyers have joked to me in the past that Amazon should send US Attorney General Eric Holder a holiday card for suing Apple and the publishers.

Amazon will get to offers it own views directly; its executives, along with publishing executives, will be among the witnesses testifying on behalf of the Department of Justice.

For now, Judge Cote has decided that the evidence Apple is seeking will remain redacted. But the issue will not doubt arise again if the trial, scheduled to begin on June 3, goes ahead as planned. There is a pre-trial conference planned for later this Thursday — we’ll let you know if any new twists emerge.

Here’s the letter from Apple’s law firm:

Amazon to Disclose (Request)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from connected consumer’s second quarter
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook

A week after Google announced its Cloud Datastore, a managed NoSQL database, it’s cutting its price.

That means a 25 percent lower prices in some cases for both Cloud Datastore per se and Google App Engine’s High Replication Datastore (HRD), according to a Google blog post.

So that’s the latest cloud price cut, but it won’t be the last. Next up: Amazon? Microsoft?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• How the mega data center is changing the hardware and data center markets

The tablets were already available in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan (as well as the U.S., of course). While a 4G LTE version of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is available in the U.S., only Wi-Fi versions are available internationally.

“Kindle Fire HD is the #1 best-selling item in the world for Amazon since its launch, and we’re thrilled to make it available to even more customers around the globe today,” Dave Limp, VP Kindle, said in a statement.

In the U.S., the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, which is Amazon’s answer to the iPad, got a big price cut in March. The 4G LTE, 32 GB version, which had been $499, was cut to $399. The Wi-Fi-only version of the same tablet got a price cut of $30 — to $269 for the 16 GB version and $299 for the 32 GB version. Internationally, prices will vary based on operating costs.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

That doesn’t stop readers from writing their own spinoffs anyway: The largest fan fiction site, FanFiction.net, hosts millions of free stories. And in works like these — and the passionate readers who create them — Amazon sees the potential for profit.

On Wednesday, Amazon Publishing announced Kindle Worlds, “the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so.” The company is making this work by securing licenses from existing entertainment properties and by paying royalties to both the original author and the fan fiction author.

So far, Kindle Worlds has licenses for three Alloy Entertainment properties: Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and Vampire Diaries. Writers can publish “authorized stories” inspired by these properties and sell them in the Kindle Store; Amazon says it will add more licenses soon, in areas like “books, games, TV, movies and music.”

The fan fiction authors get a royalty of 35 percent for works of at least 10,000 words, and a royalty of 20 percent on works between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Amazon is also paying royalties to the original authors of the properties, but would not disclose that royalty rate.

Kindle Worlds is not a self-publishing platform like KDP. First of all, any works published through Kindle Worlds are published by Amazon Publishing — they’re not self-published, so the author doesn’t retain print or digital rights and doesn’t set the work’s price. The website notes that “Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.” Second, Kindle Worlds won’t publish all of the works submitted to it; it will only accept some (though the company says it aims to accept as many as possible, as long as they adhere to content guidelines). Finally, “Amazon Publishing will set the price for Kindle Worlds stories. Most will be priced from $0.99 through $3.99.”

Kindle Worlds will officially launch in June with “over 50 commissioned works” from authors like Barbara Freethy, John Everson and Colleen Thompson. At that time, readers can also start submitting works to Kindle Worlds.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook

Pinterest is launching three distinct types of pins, with one type each for food, retail products, and movies. The new format will only work with items pinned from the launch partner sites, but the number of partners is wide-reaching, and will grow. If you click on a food pin, it will now include the ingredient list and relevant information below the photo, auto-generated from the original site. Product photos will show where you can find the item for sale, and the movie pins will show information about the movie such as its rating, cast and release date.

The list of brands participating in the launch demonstrates the strong interest from U.S. retailers in getting on board with Pinterest. Some of the launch partners include: eBay, Etsy, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Sony, Target, Urban Outfitters, Wal-Mart, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Martha Stewart Living, Whole Foods, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Companies who want to be included in the program can apply on Pinterest’s developer page.

A Pinterest representative sought to emphasize that the new pins are not a form of advertising, but are instead supposed to make pins more “actionable,” a term the company has been using for a while now, including in our interview with CEO Ben Silbermann just last week.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he told us at the time. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

One major complaint with Pinterest, which has given an advantage to sites like Wanelo or Nasty Gal, is that users frequently share or re-pin the same photo thousands of times, but when you actually click the photo to see where it came from the link is broken.

If more and more companies and popular blogs integrate their photos of inventory with Pinterest under the new pin structure, it could make items more trackable on the site — which would be handy for consumers and crucial if Pinterest wants to eventually profit from the traffic it generates.

And it’s not an insignificant amount of web traffic. While Pinterest doesn’t officially release any stats, a recent ComScore report put the number of users at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report on social media put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is slightly less than the 16 percent on Twitter, and more than the 13 percent on Instagram — and far more than the 6 percent on Yahoo’s apparent new friend Tumblr.

A company spokesperson said Pinterest is currently not profiting from the new integration with brands. But the strong interest on the part of the companies and the launch of a tech platform to support them paves the way for making money in the future. After all, Pinterest just raised $200 million in new funding — it has to be looking to make money at some point.

It’s an inevitable move for Pinterest to accelerate its growth, as we noted in a story on the small team’s unique symbiosis between design and engineering. But the site needs to make sure it crafts a business model that fits with its content, much as Twitter has built up promoted tweets.

Pinterest is still in the early days of that growth, but all sorts of e-commerce companies, from the startup Wanelo to behemoth Amazon, will be watching closely as this unfolds.

Updated at 9:14 PM to note that the new recipe pins will show the full ingredient list, not the full recipe.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Twitter Annotations and the Future of the Semantic Web
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

AWS has a managed NoSQL database service called DynamoDB that’s replicated across three availability zones to ensure its stays up. Google’s Cloud Datastore sounds eerily similar, according to the product’s website (although Google calls its product “NoSQL-like). It’s fully managed, built for speed and scale and is replicated across data centers. For some queries, Google even promises that Cloud Datastore will support ACID transactions.

Although the services advertise similar features in terms of availability and scalability, they’re quite different technically. Cloud Datastore is based on Google’s BigTable database (and a library called Megastore on top of it) while DynamoDB is based on Amazon’s Dynamo database. You can get details on Datastore  and how it works here. Pricing information is available here.

If its goal is to compete with AWS, though, Google’s cloud platform still has a long way to go. Yes, it has most of the key services in place and even some seeming advantages in certain areas, but it’s lacking the incredible breadth of services AWS offers — everything from virtual server instances to a devops service to a hosted data warehouse. It’s also lacking a seven-year reputation for being an all-around reliable platform and an ever-growing list of large-enterprise users.

Of course, there’s also an argument to be made that Google doesn’t really have to compete with AWS at all when it comes to cloud computing. AWS made a name for itself by  taking all the new workloads from startups and corporate developers who wanted to build new types of applications and didn’t want to deal with the IT department; Google has the same opportunity ahead of it. New programming languages like Go and the unique nature of the rest of Google’s services, Cloud Datastore included, could make it the go-to place for a class of developers that likes to push the envelope in terms of application design.

Oh, and Google has a little ace up its sleeve called Android. If someone is so inclined to develop mobile applications for the most-popular mobile operating system on the planet, there are worse places to host them.

This post was updated at 5:35 p.m. to clarify that DynamoDB and Cloud Datastore are based on different underlying technologies.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

For example, the company is looking to hire a  software development manager for its “Kumo team” who will manage:

” .. software development engineers who are developing algorithms and building systems to automatically solve a variety of Information Retrieval and Data Mining problems related to the AWS Trusted Advisor — one of the company’s biggest assets.”

The Kumo team is also looking for a software development engineer and a senior product manager.

For enterprise support, more is more

That AWS should seek to add richer functionality to Trusted Advisor should come as zero surprise. The boilerplate describing the service says AWS will continually add to the number of checks it performs.

Reached for comment, a spokeswoman said AWS is investing heavily in support “not just with Trusted Advisor but also with the Service Health Dashboard, Forums, Social Media Monitoring, Service Health Checks Support APIs” and other tools that allow its engineers and associates to deliver a good user experience.

As for “Kumo,” it means cloud in Japanese and is the name of the AWS Support software development team.

But what about third-party partners?

It’s clear that as AWS wants to make itself as enterprise-friendly as possible, providing services like these is a no brainer. But, for a half dozen or so small companies that were founded to provide cloud implementation guidance, particularly on AWS, this has to be a concern. Companies including Cloudyn, Cloudability, CloudVertical, and Newvem all harvest — with customer permission — usage data from Amazon’s APIs and use that to make their recommendations. Some of them monitor multiple clouds. Others are for AWS only, a strategy they want to reconsider going forward.

Earlier this month, AWS made a support API available that, among other things, gives customers API access to their Trusted Advisor recommendations. That was seen as a huge deal by some in the AWS partner community.

Some of these partners flipped out when Amazon made Trusted Advisor available for free for a short period. They really don’t like that it’s now making all that key data programmatically available.

Said the CEO of one of these companies: “This is another step, in a roundabout way, of AWS giving their customers a Cloud Economics toolset. I’m not sure they haven’t just head-on launched a Cloud Economics tool — users need quite a lot of expertise to hack together the various data sets you can get exported to S3 – and now this. I suppose that’s the short-term opportunity for companies like ourselves.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud
• Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine

The Digital Reader, which has been following this story for several months, reported Monday that an unnamed Delaware-based LLC was the new owner of Liquavista. Amazon confirmed the purchase in a statement:

“We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.”

The purchase price was undisclosed, though it may be made public in Amazon SEC filings’s next quarter.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets obviously already have color screens, but Liquavista’s technology offers the potential for color screens that wouldn’t deplete battery life to be added to e-ink readers. This would be particularly useful for children’s books and graphic novels.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

“We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities,” Mike George, Amazon’s VP of apps and games, said in a statement. “Today is Day One for Coins.”

Users can buy 100 coins for $1, with discounts up to 10 percent for larger purchases. Developers get their standard 70 percent revenue share for purchases made with Amazon Coins.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A look back at mobile in the third quarter
• A near-term outlook for the mobile app marketplace
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate