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Last Thursday was a red-letter day for content publishers as Apple announced iBooks 2, iBooks Author and iTunes U in a special event. Though the emphasis was on education, the real story is Apple’s aggressive pursuit the self-publishing space in direct competition to Amazon and their Kindle Fire, the iPad’s nearest threat.

We have to shake our heads at analysts who call the iBooks announcement underwhelming or say self-publishing is a fad. The reality is that interactive books and self-publishing are two markets in their infancy, but both will be quite grown up in a matter of years, not decades. Even at the lightning pace of digital technology, it will take a while to unseat a 200-year technology as treasured as the printed book. This is especially true when the roughly 129,864,880 books published to date are quite un-interactive and don’t have much to gain from going digital outside of the intrinsic interactivity of the medium, like the ability to dynamically search and index text.

This incredible story about a writer who made a record-breaking $100,000 in three weeks succinctly illustrates Amazon’s leadership of the market, as well as the primacy of the platform as marketing powerhouse. Try telling a writer that self-publishing isn’t the future. The author mentioned above, Joe Konrath, puts it best in his own words: “This has now become the best way in the history of mankind for a writer to earn money. It may be one of the greatest ways to ever make money, period.”

The real story of yesterday’s announcement was not iBooks 2, the revamped iTunes U or any of the educational initiatives. The question of whether Apple can save education is interesting, and the interactive textbooks and cloud-based curriculums go a long way to trying. The bigger question concerns who wins the Apple vs. Amazon battle over self publishing. Of course, we can’t automatically count Google out. They’ve scanned most of those boring non-interactive books and have a self-publishing platform of their own.

The real meat of Apple’s announcement was the free iBooks Author app, which demystifies interactive book design and publishing by drawing on that classic Apple UX magic. This is where Amazon and Google have been severely lacking — in an HTML5 world, many of today’s eBooks feel very HTML 1.0. iBooks Author could change all that, making reading on a tablet or other mobile device a truly enhanced experience.

There is, of course, a catch — as there often is with Apple’s “walled garden” strategy. Ars Technica points out that the end user licensing agreement forces the publisher into an exclusive sales contract if they use the iBooks Author software. This underscores how fierce and aggressive the competition is over this market. The article goes on to detail squabbling over the open ePub format and the inherent challenges in maintaining good design while dynamically flowing text for any size and type of device.

This “walled garden” can have its benefits, too. Besides the obvious business advantage, it’s easier for Apple to provide a more consistent and therefore richer user experience across all devices. Also, Amazon has struggled with copyright infringement as their open platform is plagued with unauthorized duplicates of popular works. If a too-far-reaching copyright bill like SOPA was to pass, Amazon would be in hot water for facilitating this infringement. This is to say nothing of continued legal challenges for Google, undermining their grand vision of a globally accessible online library.

The long game is interesting and by no means certain. In our estimation, Amazon looks hard to beat. Writers will certainly balk at the exclusive licensing agreement, and it will take a new generation of authors to harness the power of interactive books. eInk readers are inexpensive and preferred by many dedicated readers. Amazon has the brand recognition as the world’s biggest bookstore and the Kindle is synonymous with reading. Perhaps the biggest factor is Amazon’s perceived strategy to drive the cost of the Kindle down to “free”, finding it more profitable to get the devices in as many hands as possible and just rake in the dough by selling content. We’ll be watching… and reading closely.