e-book battle heating up? No.

The iPad has launched with support for apple’s iBooks store and a kindle app for Amazon’s e-book platform. You might think that this heralds the beginning of a titanic competition amongst devices, stores, formats, and platforms. You’d be wrong. From here on out the competition comes down to nothing but the stores.

What you’ve actually just witnessed is the final step that renders inevitable the successful conclusion of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ master plan. From here on out it is just gravy.

The real battles were to get the book buying public to accept paying for an e-book as a substitute for buying a real book and to convince publishers to offer e-book versions of their money making best sellers on day one. These two goals were why the Kindle was created, and it has succeeded admirably.

All that Bezos ever wanted Amazon to be was the best book store in the world, but it could be so much better of a book store if people read digital books. Instant downloads of purchases would remove the last barrier to buying books online and would allow customers to buy a lot more books. By the time the Kindle launched in 2007 it was clear that neither Sony nor any of the other e-reader manufacturers was able to deliver a reading experience compelling enough to drive widespread adoption of digital book purchasing.

Amazon had been trying to sell digital versions for other readers and not getting much traction. So they went out and created the market themselves by putting together a platform consisting of an integrated reader and store that combined a great reading experience, a deep selection of titles, and the ability to instantly buy a new book for the device anywhere at any time. This was the stuff of bibliophiles’ dreams.

The purchasing statistics, with a little help from the “if you’d like to buy a kindle version of this book click here to send a message to the publisher” button placed on books that don’t have a kindle edition, were convincing enough to get the publishers to finally come on board in a meaningful way. Thus was born a thriving Amazon e-book ecosystem.

This was an important step, but wasn’t the end goal. Bezos wants to sell e-books to everyone for any device. Kindle’s success convinced other players, like Barnes and Noble, to enter the game in a big way. If the Kindle hadn’t successfully come before, the only e-reading that would be under discussion for the iPad would be pdf files. Amazon single handedly made e-books and e-readers into a viable business.

Now comes the end game of market maturity. Reader software for general purpose devices like the iPad and laptops will quickly settle on a standardized feature set that gives the best experience for any given device. A year from now you won’t be able to find any significant difference among the several methods for reading books on the iPad. Similarly, the ideal feature set for dedicated portable reader hardware will become clear and you will make your purchasing decisions primarily on what price you want to pay, what screen size you want and  how pretty it is. The inevitable HTC readers will read books from Amazon, B&N or Apple, and have wireless access to all three stores.

So in the next year or two we will be able to buy any book, from any bookstore, and read it on any of our devices. All that will be left is who has the best bookstore. That is a game that Amazon can win, and a field of play that Jeff Bezos labored mightily to create. You can’t help but admire the ability to see how the world should be and then go out and make it happen.