There’s been a lot of confusion in the e-Reader space, especially in the last several months. Things were comparatively easy when all we had to do was compare apples to apples when looking at the Kindle, Sony’s e-Readers, and the Nook side-by-side. They all sport e-Ink, their technology shares the same basic footprint, and they all have the same basic purpose. With the entrance of tablets into the market, however, things are starting to get more complicated.

The iPad is probably the principal offender. When Steve Jobs took the podium to announce the iPad to the world, he unveiled Apple’s intentions to become a major player in the world of eBook publishing as well with their new storefront, the iBookstore. While at its heart, the iPad is primarily a tablet computer, the comparisons with Amazon’s Kindle existed far before we’d ever actually seen the device, so the iBookstore announcement really caught nobody by surprise.

That doesn’t mean it’s not confusing. Users of Apple’s iPhone have been buying and reading Amazon books on their smart phones for months now, so it had long been assumed that the content moratorium between the two big companies would extend to the iPad as well, giving users two options when it came to buying eBooks for their iPad. Now, the rumor is that Barnes & Noble has intentions of releasing their own eReader application for the iPad, and quickly. Says the official statement from B&N, “Designed specifically for the iPad, our new B&N e-Reader will give our customers access to more than one million eBooks, magazines and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, as well as the existing content in their Barnes & Noble digital library.”

If three bookstores on the iPad aren’t going to be confusing enough for you, consider this leaked info about Dell’s upcoming tablet, the Mini 5. According to Dell documentation obtained by Engadget, the Mini 5 will prominently feature a content partnership with Amazon, meaning that you’ll be able to access all of your Kindle books on this shiny new multi-colored tablet. It doesn’t stop there, either! Because the Mini 5 utilizes the Android operating system, we’ll likely see the Kindle for Droid app that I’ve been clamoring for on a similar timeline.

The way it’s shaping up, the biggest fight yet to come in the e-Reader space might not actually be between rival hardware manufacturers, but between rival eBookstores. The high costs of producing hardware usually makes eReaders themselves something of a loss-leader for companies like Apple, Amazon, and B&N. They’re willing to bite the bullet on that initial hardware investment, because then you become a customer of their respective store, where the margins on books are much better. If the next round of eReaders feature compatibility with one or more stores, and you can access any of them from your smart phone, the focus may well shift from which hardware has the best technology to which store offers the most content at the lowest price.

While in theory this would all lead to something of a customer utopia, where new releases aren’t sold at absurd prices, there are still lots of dominos yet to fall. Apple could very easily put the kibosh on any and all rival eBook apps for the iPad, and there’s nothing necessarily compelling Barnes & Noble or Amazon to follow suit. Still, it’s fun to imagine a scenario where the consumer actually comes out ahead for once!