It seems that Apple’s upcoming iPad tablet won’t be shipping with the company’s iBooks software, one of the main talking points of the device.

Not bundling iBooks seems a strange move

It seems that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has applied some fairly close reading to Apple’s description of its upcoming tablet device. Apparently, when it comes to time to list the various bits and pieces that the iPad has to offer its users, Apple describes the iBooks app by saying that,

“The iBooks app is a great new way to read books. Download the free app from the App Store and buy everything from classics to best sellers from the built-in iBookstore. Once you’ve bought a book, it’s displayed on your Bookshelf. Just tap it to start reading…”

Considering the fact that Apple is touting the iPad as an ebook reader, it seems very strange indeed to see that the device doesn’t actually ship with the software to read digital books on it, though in some ways it’s unsurprising. There have been a number of suggestions as to why this might be the case, but there are two that are most convincing.

The first is that Apple is using the fact that most of its iPad customers will download the iBooks app as one of their first actions as iPad owners to get those who aren’t coming from an iPhone or iPod Touch enabled world to start familiarising themselves with the App Store as early as possible, which could certainly prove profitable in the long run.

The second reason is that Apple could well issue updates to iBooks in a more timely fashion if the app is a standalone, downloaded affair than if it’s part of the iPad’s version of iPhone OS, in which case updates could be left languishing until updates to the OS itself were pushed out.