It’s been a blistering few days for Amazon.com. Late last week analysts downgraded its stock from “buy” to “neutral,” as a Barron’s report detailed, citing, among other reasons, “decelerating growth” and “Increasing competitive pressures in digital media” (aka, the Apple iPad). The same day, a Wall Street Journal commentary by James Altucher concurred, suggesting short-selling Amazon stock, because the company was “overreaching,” and because “The competition from Apple (AAPL) on the e-reader side and Google (GOOG) on the cloud side present a devastating “one-two punch.”

So much for what financial types think of Amazon. The next day, The Nation released online a story slated to appear in the print magazine on Monday, in which OR Books co-publisher Colin Robinson attacked the company on cultural grounds, saying “the problems caused by Amazon’s business practices extend to fundamental matters of the future of the book business and the diversity of our culture as a whole.” Explains Robinson,

The accumulated effect of Amazon’s pricing policy, its massive volume and its metric-based recommendations system is, in fact, to diminish real choice for the consumer. Though the overall number of titles published each year has risen sharply, the under-resourcing of mid-list books is producing a pattern that joins an enormously attenuated tail (a tiny number of customers buying from a huge range of titles) to a Brobdingnagian head (an increasing number of purchasers buying the same few lead titles), with less and less in between. Responding to the effects of price wars last fall the American Booksellers Association warned, “If left unchecked…predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public.”

So perhaps it’s no coincidence that on the day The Nation story officially released — yesterday — Amazon made some announcements of its own. As a Wall Street Journal story by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reports, the company released a statement in which “Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also countered the perception that sales of the company’s Kindle e-reading device had suffered due to competition from other devices, such as Apple Inc.’s iPad.”

In fact, claimed Bezos, the company had “reached a tipping point” since having lowered the price of the Kindle and as a result had “reached a milestone, selling more e-books than hardbacks over the past three months …. Over the past month, the Seattle retailer sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books it sold, it said.”

But of course, Amazon — as ever — offered absolutely no proof of its claims. As the WSJ report noted, “the statistics that Amazon shared were all relative — it didn’t share actual sales figures. The company has never said how many Kindle devices or e-books it has sold.”

Still, that didn’t stop some geniuses on Wall Street — you know, like those wonderful folks who brought us the Recession — from making influential forecasts based on no known reality: “That is dramatic evidence of how powerful the e-book is now,” Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney tells the WSJ, “…. and Amazon is extremely well positioned to take advantage of it.”

But not everyone in publishing is buying this as a death knell for print, or even necessarily the historic moment Jeff Bezos is claiming. Random House president Madeline McIntosh says, “Our conclusion is that there’s no data to prove any connection — good or bad — between growth in e-books and the growth or decline, in trade paperback sales. … If anything, we may be seeing a positive effect in which the steady pace of e-book sales helps to keep a book in front-of-mind for a growing number of consumers after hardcover momentum slows.”