The electronic book market has been heating up in recent weeks, with the rollout of the iPad, Amazon's battles with publishers over e-book prices, and price cuts for Barnes & Noble's Nook and Amazon's Kindle. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos addresses those topics in a new interview with Fortune magazine, and while he doesn't stray too far from his talking points, he does highlight parts of Amazon's strategy going forward, including the company's continuing push for low-priced e-books.

Read on for excerpts.

Despite reports of accelerating iPad sales, Bezos downplays the competitive threat posed by Apple's tablet:

Fortune: Obviously, the Kindle's price drop was in response to Barnes & Noble's price cut on the Nook. Did the iPad and its overnight success play a role, too?

Bezos: No. The iPad… I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category. The Kindle is for readers.

Amazon hasn't revealed Kindle sales, saying only that "millions" have been sold, and Bezos doesn't provide any numbers in this interview.

Interestingly, Amazon has been pretty aggressive in getting its Kindle content into the iPad and other devices (Amazon recently updated its Kindle app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to let users access embedded video and audio in e-books).

While Apple and its new pricing model for e-books have caused Amazon some headaches, Bezos makes clear that Amazon isn't giving up on low-cost e-books.

Fortune: In the past, you've been a big proponent of lower prices for ebooks and an open opponent of the book publisher agency model, which allows the publisher to set the final retail price whether there's an intermediary retailer or not. Now that you've switched to an agency model, will ebookstores like Amazon's get hurt?

Bezos: No. First of all, there are a bunch of publishers of all sizes, and they don't all have one opinion. There are as many opinions about what the right thing to do is as there are publishers. So you're seeing that some of them are being very aggressive on prices, pricing their books well below $9.99.

Others are trying to do everything they can to make prices as high as possible. And what you're going to see is a share shift from one group of publishers to this other group of publishers.

Fortune: Do you expect a significant share shift? When do you see that happening?

Bezos: It's a significant shift and we're seeing it already.

Translation: Amazon will continue to encourage smaller publishers to keep to the $9.99-and-below standard for new e-books, thereby maintaining price pressure on the larger publishers.

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