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Amazon is turning another page.

After disrupting the retail distribution of books, it appears that the Seattle e-tailer plans to become a major book publisher. Earlier this month, the company announced the launch of Montlake Romance, a new unit that will publish original fiction.

But ConsumerEdge Research financial analyst Faye Landes suspects that Amazon.com's (AMZN) "plans and ambitions are much broader, and are likely to be highly disruptive to the book industry in many ways."

Given the company's track record in electronic commerce and cloud computing, and the way Chief Executive Jeff Bezos thinks, Landes' speculation doesn't seem like much of a stretch. Amazon's Kindle electronic reading device already has revolutionized the book industry.

Landes predicts that Amazon will set up a book-publishing operation in New York City. She points to last week's hiring of literary agent and former publishing executive Larry Kirshbaum as another piece of evidence. Amazon's publishing plans were the focus of discussion last week at an annual publishing trade fair BookExpo America held in New York, according to Landes.

The reason Amazon wants to get into publishing is closely tied to its commitment to sell both paper and digital books, she explains. After all, books have been the "gateway drug" to Amazon's electronic-commerce Website ever since Bezos launched his Internet company.

By entering the business, Amazon will gain leverage with other book publishers. But most important, it might provide some defense against Apple (AAPL), whose iPad tablet devices compete with Kindle.

"A robust publishing operation gives Amazon a nice negotiating tool if, as has been speculated periodically, Apple makes noise about taking a big cut of Kindle [content] sales through Apple devices," Landes posits.

Starting with romance novels makes a lot of sense. It's one of the most popular categories of e-books, and people who read them tend to read a lot of them quickly. The digital format is ideal because romance aficionados don't have to lug all those books around. But Landes expects that Amazon will also expand into other book categories, such as mysteries, thrillers and science fiction.

This probably isn't good news for other publishers, which already resent Amazon's distribution power. The company is the second-largest seller of physical books, with a 15% market share based on dollar volume, behind Barnes & Noble (BKS), with 23%. Borders Group, which has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is third with 13% but lost share in 2010.

Amazon's the largest seller of e-readers, with 29% of the market. Apple is second, with 17%, and Barnes & Noble's Nook device is third, with 8%.

To be sure, selling books over the Internet changed the industry forever and is killing shopping-mall owners as tenant book stores close down. But the game isn't over. Earlier in May, John Malone's Liberty Media (LINTA) (LINTA) made a bid to buy Barnes & Noble for $1.02 billion, about nine months after the bookstore chain put itself on the block. Now there are rumors that Liberty is also making a run at Borders.