It was supposed to be one of the day’s big surprises, but there they were, according to a PC Magazine report, a couple of hours before Steve Jobs made the big announcement: Random House books in the iBookstore. D’oh!

Well, the launch of the newest iPad went off without a hitch otherwise. But as Jeffrey Trachtenberg reminds us in a Wall Street Journal report, the fact that you can now read books from the biggest publisher in the world is a big deal:

Random House had been the only one of the six major U.S. publishers not to adopt the agency model for its digital titles in the U.S. As such, Random House’s e-books were available for purchase only from retail bookstore apps on the iPad, but not from the iBookstore directly.

A big deal, yes — maybe it’s the end of discounting, or of Amazon’s blistering dominance, or the final liberation of ebooks — but you’d never know it from the “paper of record.” That is, in the New York Times report on the iPad 2 launch event, you have to look way down toward the very bottom of the very long article to learn that, two hours after Random House books started appearing in the iBookstore,

Mr. Jobs also announced that books from Random House, a holdout publisher, would be available on its iBookstore.