Considering the ongoing skirmishes going on right now between Amazon and Google over digital book publishing, it’s more than ironic that Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was one of only a few initial investors in the search giant.

But–in one of the many interesting details in New Yorker author Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It”–it was indeed Bezos who invested $250,000 in the start-up in 1998 at four cents a share.

(Some previous reports have had it at six cents a share and at a $100,000 level.)

Three of the others, according to Auletta, all of whom ponied up the same amount, were Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, entrepreneur Ram Shriram and Sun Microsystems (JAVA) co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

Later, more angels invested in Google (GOOG), followed by the big $25 million venture round by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital in mid-1999.

While it was known back when Google went public in 2004 that Bezos held about three million shares in the IPO (Auletta said it was precisely 3.3 million shares), the book has a lot of the details about the meeting between him and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the Menlo Park, Calif., garage of current Google exec Susan Wojcicki.

He had been brought there, according to the book, by Shriram, who had sold his company, Junglee, to Amazon (AMZN) in 1998.

“I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos told Auletta in an interview–not that there’s anything wrong with that considering the flip-flop relationships of Silicon Valley.

He’d presumably be more in love–and less inclined to be fighting Google, first in search with A9 and now in online publishing–if he had held onto those shares.

That stock would be worth $1.6 billion today.

But a spokesman for Amazon declined to comment on what Bezos did with his Google stake, noting it was a personal investment.

Interestingly, Bezos is also an early investor in the current hotsy-totsy microblogging start-up, Twitter.

A part of Auletta’s book, which is slated to come out Nov. 3, is in this week’s New Yorker in an excerpt called “Searching for Trouble.” It is, oddly, not available online.

In any case, the piece is mostly about the various ways Brin and Page dissed big media moguls, figuratively (destroying old media advertising business models) and literally (showing up at meetings sweaty and wearing skates and gym shorts).

Good thing they never did that to Bezos.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

At the SIIA Information Summit yesterday, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, who recently did a piece on Google, noted:

We’re in an engineering culture. You couldn’t put a [Rupert] Murdoch or a [Michael] Eisner in charge of a company like that. It’s been tried. Terry Semel led Yahoo. I just spent some time with Google engineers. I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying. I don’t think [Semel] understood the engineers’ language, so he couldn’t challenge them. I suspect that’s one reason he didn’t last.”

Auletta is right, and it is an increasingly interesting issue as we move forward with the hyper-digitization of content.

While, for example, the use of online video increases exponentially, how big an audience can be created for any one property without the kind of intense programming and marketing that the entertainment industry is famous for?

On the other hand, is an increasingly massive reliance on e-metrics–the ability to minutely tell and even predict what an online audience wants by their clicking and being perfected by engineers at widget companies like Slide–the right direction?

I have no idea, but the delta is one that needs bridging.

Hooray for Hollywood!

In an interview with writer (and BoomTown friend!) Ken Auletta at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, the voluble Zucker (pictured here) blamed Apple for ruining the music business.

Not the shortsighted music companies that foisted crappy albums, onerous distribution methods and too-high prices on the consuming public. But Apple, which, of course, had essentially launched the digital music business for paid downloads.

To be fair, Zucker did add “in terms of pricing” to the idea that Apple was the, sorry, spoiler, noting that NBCU only had $15 million in revenue for its video fare on iTunes in its last year (a deal it recently pulled out of, with plans to create its own service).

Zucker said NBCU only wanted to raise prices on some shows it was selling to get better returns, even though Apple’s Steve Jobs has stuck to his guns on keeping pricing lower.

That has driven the entertainment industry nuts, since the iPod device has essentially been the only one widely embraced by consumers.

“We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side,” said Zucker, in a sound bite that his PR person doubtlessly spent all night crafting (and it’s choice!).

More astonishing, he even seemed to ask for a vig from sales of the hugely popular iPod device, since “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money.”

Oh my. That’s sort of like Britney Spears asking the tabloids to hand over a big bag of Benjamins for making such bank covering her riveting high jinks and crotch emergencies. Frankly, she has a better argument than Zucker.

In fact, the NBCU honcho has been in a bit of a rant of late, saying at an antipiracy summit hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently that the government must act as if we were in a shock-and-awe war from copyright thieves.

He even asked for intellectual-property enforcement bureaus run by the Feds and also federal monies for state and local governments to investigate dangerous teen CD ripping.

“We need, across the board, to move IP enforcement up the agenda of the federal government,” said Zucker, noting the mission was “absolutely critical to our economic prosperity.”

Although I would agree piracy is an important issue, here’s what is most critical: That Zucker leans more to the mindset that took baby steps in creating Hulu as more of a distributed operation than a command-and-control style that Hollywood has favored so far, despite a complete rejection by consumers.

Piracy and a whole lot more will be assuaged when entertainment companies stop fighting a trend, which is that consumers have taken control and they are not handing power back.

Not everything about Hulu is great–no downloads, limiting hit shows’ availability, not enough social-interaction tools and, eeeek in the Age of YouTube, no user-generated content section.

Still, there is much Hulu gets right, especially in its easy-to-use embedding capability and seeming willingness to let consumers decide what clips they want.

Thus, Zucker’s words made me worry he had some sort of multiple-personality disorder when I read them yesterday, because he needn’t have picked such a public fight with the digital media’s most potent symbol just over his pique over price.

In the antipiracy speech, Zucker joked: “Our business models today are changing faster than a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit gets posted on YouTube.”

You got that right, Jeff. Now try and pay attention to yourself.