Automatically inport to iBooks?

I download more than a handful of epub files on a fairly frequent basis. Is there some way that I can tell Hazel to scan the Downloads folder for *.epub and automatically import the resulting files into iBooks, like can be done with music files into iTunes?

Unfortunately, iBooks is not AppleScriptable so there's no good way to automate it. You can try opening epubs in iBooks, which should import them, but will also have the side effect of opening it as well.