It seems that Random House could well be considering keeping its content away from Apple’s iPad when the device eventually hits, for fear of sparking a price war across platforms.

Still no word on if and when we can expect to see iBooks in Europe...

According to the report coming from the Financial Times, Apple’s iBooks, which is to be rolled out with the iPad, has managed to secure the rest of the top five book publishers, including Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Harper-Collins and Penguin. The big fear, as with Amazon’s Kindle platform last year, is that Apple’s pricing setup might well see books move into a price war the likes of which they’ve not seen in a very long time.

For the moment, the big question will be just how the iBooks store will work, with the Financial Times pointing out that Apple wants to take a 30% cut of any books sold through the service, while other services, Amazon itself included, simply bulk buy and then add on their own profit. Certainly, it’s interesting to see that Apple could well end up launching iBooks without support from one of the biggest publishers on earth, but given the fact that it’s got so many on board already it stands to reason that it won’t take quite as big a hit as it otherwise might have.

Of course, with all of this hubbub about iBooks and pricing it’s hard not to consider Amazon’s recent revelation of a Kindle app designed specifically for the iPad, which, if it manages to boast Random House where iBooks might not, would certainly have readers feeling compelled to leave iBooks alone in favour of Amazon’s cross-platform ebook service.

That’s dependent on Amazon’s Kindle app making it onto the iPad though, which is in itself no sure thing.