Apple and Amazon are rapidly changing the way books are consumed and read thanks to the iPhone & iPad and Kindle. The other effect of this is that it’s actually helping to ease the barriers to entry into the book publishing and sales market.

In the past an author would need to have an agent pitch books to publishers in the hopes it might get picked up, but not anymore. Now if you have a Mac and a word processor and a bit of patience, you can create your own book in the EPUB format and upload it directly to the iTunes iBookstore for sales.

OK well it’s not quite that simple (yet), but it’s not that difficult either. Just jump through a few hoops and you can get your book for sale on Apple’s online bookstore ready to be downloaded by anyone who owns an iPad or iPhone, here’s how:

Write and Publish a Book to the Apple iBook Store

First, some relatively simple requirements: you’ll need an Intel Mac running 10.5 or newer with adequate hard disk space and preferably a high speed internet connection.

1. Write the book (obvious) and get it into the iBooks compatible EPUB format (see below, it is easy to take a file and convert to EPUB format)
2. Get a unique ISBN number for each book title you plan to release. Cost is $25 per ISBN and you can fill out an ISBN application here
3. Get the following ready: a US tax ID (social security number or EIN), valid iTunes account with credit card on file
4. When all of the above is met, you can apply to be part of the iBookstore distribution network at Apple.com

How do I create an ebook in the EPUB format?

Almost any text containing document format can be converted into EPUB ebook format and there are multiple free software options available to do this. If you would like a walkthrough check out our guide on how to convert to EPUB. It covers most major source file types you’d want to convert including PDF, RTF, HTML, DOC, TXT, and more.

Thanks to a recent software update, you can also create an ePub with Pages if you already own the iWork office productivity suite from Apple.

If you’re looking for a free solution that doesn’t involve iWork/Pages and you don’t need help, just go ahead and download Calibre, it is a good choice because it will automatically create book structures like chapters, table of contents, and allow you to insert book metadata. Oh, and it’s free (open source is nice). The interface is a little strange but it gets the job done and for the wonderful price of free, we can’t complain too much.

Can I convert an existing text or word file to EPUB?

Yes, you will need to download a program that handles the ebook conversion for you. There are many free options, see above or refer to our article on how to convert to EPUB.

Can anyone help me sell my book on Apple’s iBookstore?

Yes, there are several companies that will handle many of the complexities of selling on the iBookstore for you, but you’ll still need your book ready in the EPUB format. The best way to do this is to use an Apple approved iBookstore aggregator, Apple conveniently provides a list of approved aggregators for the iBookStore. Most of these charge an upfront fee and then handle all the distribution services for you, in many cases you’ll then receive 100% of the revenue of book sales after Apple takes their iTunes Store cut. Prices vary widely so be sure to get a few quotes before agreeing to a single aggregator.

This is the old setup of Paul Stamatiou which includes a MacBook Pro 17″, and two 24″ monitors, one hooked up to the MacBook Pro and the other hooked up to a Windows 7 PC. I might be wrong but the speakers look a lot like the amazing sounding AudioEngine A5 series. Looking pretty sweet!

The long awaited Netflix app for iPhone is finally here. It’s a free download and you can sign up for a free trial membership to watch movies, but to really enjoy the perks of Netflix you’ll need to sign up for a membership which runs about $9/month.

As expected you can manager your queue and other essential Netflix tasks, but the app is especially cool because it will remember where you left a movie off, allowing you to resume watching it later from your TV, computer, or even iPad. I am a complete Netflix addict so it’s great to finally have it on the iPhone in addition to the iPad (the app also runs on the iPod touch).

You can grab Netflix for iPhone from the iTunes app store, no surprise but it is currently the #1 app on the App Store.

If you want to check out Android OS, you can download and run a pre-configured Android OS Virtual Appliance installation within VirtualBox. You’ll need a torrent client to download the virtual machine itself, and of course Virtualbox to run it.

You can download Android OS VM here and get VirtualBox here, both are free downloads.

The Android VM was configured for an Eee-PC but runs fine inside of the VirtualBox environment. Running Android OS in a virtual machine is really helpful for anyone who wants to get their feet wet with Android development but doesn’t have an Android capable phone handy (and I’m not about to install Android on my iPhone), and it’s also nice to just play around with if you don’t have much experience with Android software.

By pasting the following small function into your .profile, you’ll be able to print random tweets from any Twitter feed:

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Photo Booth on the Mac defaults to flipping your images horizontally, this happens automatically without any user input and without it being noticed, it’s just how the camera within Photo Booth displays pictures, making it function more like a mirror rather than a traditional camera.

If you don’t images to flip like that, you can make an adjustment through the settings that will cause Photo Booth to show camera images on screen as if they were being seen from another person, rather than being flipped.

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You can now create ePub ebook files directly within Apple software thanks to a recent iWork update to the Pages app for Mac. The iWork update brings Pages to a version which includes functionality to export documents as ePub format, it’s easy to do.

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Evom is a great free Mac app that converts video to audio tracks and lets you easily download the audio of flash movies from the web to your Mac. The interface is nice and simple, you can just drag a URL or file into the app and the video will download and convert for you, giving you local file system access to the audio of a source video. One common use for tools like this is turning interesting web videos into audio tracks and podcasts, like a conference talk for example, but you can imagine other use-cases as well. Now that’s exactly what I think is perhaps the best part about this app; you can easily download video and just save the audio track as an mp3 file, letting you play it in iTunes on a Mac or PC, or copy it over to an iPhone or iPad for listening in the Music app. This is great for the aforementioned conference talk example, an interesting video, or even something like an audio lesson that you enjoy but you can’t track it down otherwise.

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Line numbers are so useful to have in a good text editor that I’m surprised they aren’t enabled by default in TextWrangler. Regardless, they’re easy to display so here are two different ways to show line numbers in a text file. The first is through the View menu:

• In TextWrangler, open the View Menu
• Navigate to the “Text Display” submenu
• Select “Show Line Numbers

Change take effect immediately and you can hide the line numbers by just selecting the option again. You can also set the line numbers within the TextWrangler preferences:
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Apple has scheduled an event for next week at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, California. What’s the occasion? Nobody knows for sure but given the image they provided with the press release (shown above) you can expect it to be about the iPod and iTunes. Recent hardware leaks suggest their will be a new iPod touch released at the event that will have features similar to the iPhone 4, including a higher resolution screen and dual cameras for FaceTime video chat.

The rumor mill also suggests that the upcoming Apple event will be used to unleash a revised AppleTV with access to the App Store and TV show rentals, at least according to a recent Bloomberg article:

[TV] Episodes will be available to Apple’s rental service within 24 hours of their air dates and will be commercial-free, one of the people said. Apple plans to hold a San Francisco event Sept. 1, the company said today in an e-mailed statement. The event, which comes three weeks ahead of the new prime-time TV season, is where Apple will unveil the service and an updated line of entertainment products…

September 1 certainly looks to be an interesting day.

What is mouse acceleration?
Mouse acceleration is something most Mac users don’t think twice about, many aren’t aware it even exists. By default the mouse drivers count the movement of your mouse and depending on your sensitivity settings, the cursor will then move across the screen by a similar and consistent distance. Mouse acceleration is basically a threshold setting on top of this, so when the mouse is moved past a certain point or at a certain speed, the cursor itself moves more quickly and goes further, thus accelerating the movement speed and rate of the mouse cursor.

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DaisyDisk is a beautiful application that gives you an excellent breakdown of disk space usage on your Mac’s hard drives. Using DaisyDisk is about as easy as it gets, you select the drive you want to scan, let it run, and wait a minute or two until a great looking interactive graphic is presented to you. The larger the blocks, the larger the contents combined file size. Hovering over the blocks lets you see live information on what exactly they are, and you can then right-click on the graphic to show the contents in the Finder.

With DaisyDisk I was able to identify 4.3GB of Podcasts that I haven’t listened to in about two years… that’s 4.3 precious gigabytes of my MacBook’s hard drive! Anytime I’ve cleaned up disk space on my Mac before I generally just leave the iTunes directory alone because I don’t want to delete any music, but what’s the point in keeping ancient podcasts about topics that are no longer even relevant? This is something I totally overlooked with just manual folder size inspections, but it stood out like a sore thumb in DaisyDisk. Honestly I’m a bit confused as to why Apple doesn’t integrate something like this directly into their own Disk Utility, it’s that useful, plus the interface and snappiness feels right at home in Mac OS X.

I am pleased to say that DaisyDisk has a nice comfortable home in my /Applications/Utilities/ folder and I’ll be using it again very soon for some much needed Spring Cleaning.

You can download a free demo of DaisyDisk, otherwise the retail version is $19.95 and available at DaisyDiskApp.com

Update: Check out the comments below for some similar but free suggestions from our users.

Fire up Software Update, Apple has released a security update for Mac OS X. Several potential exploits are patched in the update, one of them looks similar to the PDF exploit that was used for the web based easy iPhone jailbreak that was patched with iOS 4.0.2. Who knew that Mac OS X and iOS shared some of the same vulnerabilities? Other security issues fixed involve PHP, Samba, libsecurity, CoreGraphics, ClamAV, CFNetwork, and ATS.

As usual, the security update requires a system reboot.

Here’s a Mac heartbreaker: a motorcycle enthusiast went for a ride carrying his MacBook Pro 13″ in a backpack, unfortunately the zipper holding the MacBook Pro in place failed going a reported 195mph (315km/h)!
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If you use the command line frequently, chances are you may have some bad command line habits. IBM’s DeveloperWorks site has posted 10 good UNIX usage habit tips, some of them are just pretty handy tricks in general and if you’re new to the Mac OS X Terminal, you’ll probably learn something since practically all of them work within the Mac OS X command line.

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Apple looks like they’ll be jumping full force into the touch screen market sometime in the future. An uncovered patent application shows an iMac Touch that runs both Mac OS X and iOS, which seamlessly switches between the two operating systems depending on how the screen is orientated.

In this image, the iMac screen is tilted upright to be used as a traditional Mac with a keyboard. In this orientation the iMac runs Mac OS X and would appear as any other iMac.

Here’s where things get interesting:

This image shows the same iMac slanted down, and when orientated horizontally the iMac looks to seamlessly switch to running the touch based iOS. Amazing! The patent application also describes touchable areas on the screen that would activate iOS, suggesting that iOS will run on a layer atop Mac OS X, almost like a super powerful touch version of Dashboard.

The patent also describes similar OS switching functionality on a laptop. This is fresh off the heals of the MacBook Touch patent discovery that clearly demonstrates an Apple laptop with a high resolution touch screen.

If you’ve been were wondering what Apple plans to do with the future of their hardware and dual operating systems, this should give you some great insight. Mac OS X and iOS look to be integrated on the same hardware when applicable, allowing a user to either use the simplified touch GUI or the more powerful and traditional computing environment of Mac OS X. Will we see these features in Mac OS X 10.7 and iOS 5? Time will tell!

Head over to Patently Apple for more pictures and a good walkthrough of the patent. How many years off are these features and hardware? Who knows. Will we ever see touchscreen Macs that switch between OS on the fly? It’s as good as a patent and rumor at this point, but hopefully! This is really exciting stuff.

Gitbox is a pretty nice GUI to the Git version control system. All the features you’d expect are there: quickly see branches, history, working directory status, then easily commit, pull, merge, and push files with minimal effort. I first used Gitbox as a Preview version a while ago and enjoyed it, you’ll need both Xcode and Git installed to be able to run the app yourself.

Here’s what the Gitbox developer lists as the features:

Check Out Everything. You may check out a local branch, tag and even a remote branch with a single dropdown button. From now on you don’t have to remember the obscure branch-tracking command or edit .git/config. Select the remote branch, type a local name for it and you’re done.

Up To Date. Gitbox updates working directory status each time you focus the window. When in background, it periodically fetches data from the selected remote branch and displays unmerged commits in the history. The status of the working directory, local and remote branches are always up to date.

Rich History. History shows all commits on both local and remote branches. Non-pushed commits are green. Non-pulled commits are grey. You can also select another local branch in a “Remote branch” menu to merge it into the current one.

Clean Design. There are no palettes or additional windows cluttering the screen. Your repository fits nicely inside a single window with a few buttons. Use the Main Menu for infrequent operations such as adding a new repository URL or stashing away changes.

Super Fast. We all love the command line for the speed. But it is not very smart. Say, you move a file from one folder to another: in the Terminal you would have to “git rm” the old path (the file is gone, so no tab-completion) and “git add” the new path. And it becomes a real pain when you happen to rename multiple files. But in Gitbox you just click the checkbox. Status is updated instantly, you don’t have to type “git status” ever again.

If you’re looking for a Git GUi client for Mac OS X, check out Gitbox.

Often overlooked, the Terminal can be used to accomplish all sorts of fun stuff. Something that you may find handy, is the ability to Tweet using built in Mac OS X command line utilities like curl. Yes, curl! Now of course this is not a full featured Twitter client by any means, but if you are looking for potential geek “cred” this is a fun trick to demonstrate.

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