"Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups" Melds Ebooks -- Remember how I said we spent much of our summer working on turning our font ebooks into "Real World Mac OS X Fonts" for Peachpit Press? That wasn't all we were up to, since we also took the opportunity to sculpt the content from Joe Kissell's "Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac" and "Take Control of Mac OS X Backups" (which has now moved into second place on our best-seller list behind Joe's groundbreaking "Take Control of Upgrading to Panther") into another print book in Peachpit's Real World series: "Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups." It's 240 pages long and contains all the text from the two ebooks, massaged to merge together into a single title. If you're interested in reading Joe's sage advice in print, the book is available from all your favorite booksellers, and if you buy it from Amazon for about $20, we and Joe make a few more cents per copy.

"Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X" Updated -- We've released a minor update to Sharon Zardetto Aker's "Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X," the ultimate guide to font handling in the new world order of Mac OS X. The changes are mostly fixes for typos, along with a replacement screenshot for one that was accidentally botched in the first version. This 1.0.1 update is free to everyone who has purchased the 255-page ebook (click the Check for Updates button on the first page of your copy to access the free update); it's $20 for a new copy. However, you can save 30 percent (off your entire order, in fact) if you purchase Ergonis Software's font utility PopChar X 3.0; see the PopChar X ordering page for details. Oh, and if you were wondering, these problems were also fixed during the proofreading of "Real World Mac OS X Fonts," which includes the content from both of Sharon's font ebooks in a single volume.

"Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner" in Print! Joe Kissell's book about how to coordinate and cook a stress-free Thanksgiving dinner is a complete experiment for us, so we're trying a variety of new things with it. Since we figure that many people will want a print copy of "Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner" in the kitchen while cooking (along with a printout of the "Print Me" file that provides schedules, shopping lists, and recipes you can annotate and tape up in the kitchen while working), we've gone beyond what we've done with our print-on-demand service and are making the book available directly as a print book for $19.99 (that's for black-and-white; the color version is $35.99).

Of course, print-on-demand is still available as well for all you farsighted people who have already purchased the ebook. Just click the Check for Updates button on the cover to access a print-on-demand purchasing link where the prices are $10 lower to account for the fact that you already own the ebook. Frankly, we think it makes the most sense to buy the ebook for instant gratification and then order the print-on-demand version if you want paper, since then you don't have to wait to start reading and you'll be able to get free updates if we make any changes next year. It can take at least four to six business days for the print version to arrive, which is a far cry from the several minutes it takes to order and download the ebook.