Self-Publish Direct to the iBookstore

Well Apple announced it's launch into the Self-Publishing arena, like we all knew they would. Apparently the announcement was billed as the Sell Your Books Initiative, which lets authors get their books into the new iBooks store without having to deal with publishers and aggregators like Smashwords and Lulu among others. However, Apple is quite restrictive when it comes to adhering to certain criteria for acceptance into the iBookstore, those being:

1. Books need to have a 13-digit ISBN.
2. Books need to be in ePub format, validate against epubcheck 1.0.5, and contain no unmanifested files.
3. Authors need to have a Tax ID number and a credit card on file with Apple.
4. But here is the big one: Authors must use a Mac running OS X 10.5 or later in order to upload the files.

Well I don't know about you, but I am certainly not going to purchase a new computer just to load books to the iBookstore directly so I can cut out the aggregator split. That just wouldn't be cost effective. I suppose one could rent time on a Mac to upload the files, but that might not be convenient for many either. Course I am speaking for us PC users here. Mac users would have it a bit easier, that is once they get their epub files to validate. For most self published authors, that will be the major hurdle to overcome. ePub files are easy to make, but they aren't easy to get past epubcheck 1.0.5. If you think you can just save your Word doc to an HTML and then run it through Calibre, you are sadly mistaken. Oh you'll get an epub file, and it will probably work on most readers, but it won't pass epubcheck without errors. You can create the epub file directly in Sigil too, or InDesign, but they won't pass without errors either, so unless you are HTML savvy and can fix the errors, going with an aggregator who can properly convert your files is still your best option.