Apple has finally announced how individual authors can sell their works in iBooks without having to go through an intermediary like Smashwords. The requirements aren't too stringent (from MacLife):

Their books would have to adhere to these criteria: each one would need to have a 13-digit ISBN, be in ePub format, validate against epubcheck 1.0.5, and contain no unmanifested files. If you are not familiar with any of these Apple suggests working with their aggregation partners.

Pretty simple, really. It looks like soon, authors who're prepared to manage fifteen different accounts could easily cut out the new middlemen (Smashwords - not that I'd advocate that, they seem to offer a good product) and do it themselves across iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

There's a weird little addendum to those requirements, though:

In addition to these requirements you will need to have a US Tax ID, a valid iTunes Store account with a credit card on file, and an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5 or later.

Emphasis mine. I have no argument with the Tax ID or the store account, that makes sense. But the mac?

For any iPhone developer, this is already familiar - to develop for the iPhone, even if you don't want to sell it, you need a Mac. In some ways, I can understand that - the iPhone OS is a special breed all to itself, and Apple doesn't want to have to bother making the development kit compatable with its competitors' products.

But books? Books don't have to be written on a Mac. Books are just text. The epub format, which is the requirement listed above, is just XHTML and CSS - very similar to how a webpage is created. There's nothing magical about it that mandates, in any technological way, the use of a specific kind of computer.

But Apple is shoehorning one in. Presumably, there'll be some special kind of uploading software that only runs on Macs. And while I can see the business sense in it - force people to have one of your products if they want to use another - it leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth. Because this isn't about ensuring a useful developer platform, as it is with the iPhone. This is just pure corporate greed, and the impression that they can make anyone jump on command. It's "do things our way, or don't do them at all" - the very opposite of the consumer-friendly nature that we're supposedly moving towards.

It's epitomising the very thing that I dislike about Apple as a company. I'll be very interested to see what excuse they come up with for this.