All eyes are on Apple’s iPad, which releases April 3rd, but there are signs that the Apple device and its accompanying iBookstore won’t be the game changer for bookselling that many in the business now expect. There’s the fact that a number of industry analysts have noted serious reservations about the iBookstore’s ability to hurt Amazon’s 90 percent share of the e-book market. (And even those who think it will seriously affect Amazon’s e-book business see the change as a long-term one, taking up to five years.) There’s also the fact that the iBookstore won’t, at launch, offer titles by Random House, America’s largest publisher by sales, which is holding off selling its titles via the iBookstore for a number of clever reasons. The iBookstore will also be lacking titles from most independent book publishers, though the distributor Perseus, which works with many indies, does have an iPad deal.

Perhaps more significantly, there’s also news that the iBookstore app, despite all the buzz about it, will not be pre-installed on the iPad. The app will have to be downloaded from the app store. (Users will be prompted to “Download the iBooks app free from the App Store.â€) The news is significant because Amazon’s Kindle app can be downloaded and installed in the same way and offers some obvious and significant advantages: a wider selection of titles and lower prices. It also offer Amazon’s current users “cross-platform compatibility” — that is, the ability to seamlessly read their current library of Kindle books on the iPad.

Why download the iBookstore app over its Amazon rival or, for that matter, other e-book reading apps (like Stanza and Eucalyptus)? Right now, it’s not entirely clear, though some predict that the iBookstore will have more features than Amazon’s app. In an interview with the New York Times, Joe Wikert, general manager and publisher of O’Reilly Media, speculates that the iBookstore will “‘build out the device’s capabilities…’ while adding video and other interactive story elements to its e-books.”

All of this puts the “Kindle killer” stories we’ve seen over the past few months into perspective — and shows the degree to which faith in the iPad is actually based on Apple’s success in dominating the music business, and not on any proven dedication to bookselling. Why, after all, would Apple start negotiating with publishers just weeks before its iPad announcement if it really wanted to revolutionize the book business? And why wouldn’t it pre-install its bookselling software if it really wanted to use the iPad to win a war with Amazon? The truth in both cases seems to be that it doesn’t want to.

Rather, it looks as if Apple has entered the e-book market because it can… and perhaps because doing so wins the company a lot of press for a new device. (Think alone of the dozens of New York Times reports about book publishing and the iPad.) It’s not that the iPad won’t succeed: a Morgan Stanley anyalyst has predicted the company will sell 6 million units in 2010 alone. But its sucess will be in luring consumers wanting to watch video, surf the internet, and read documents and magazines — and, oh yes, Apple adds, you can read books too.