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ExtraBITS for 13 February 2012

This week we have some good stuff for you! Adam and his Bookle collaborator Peter Lewis joined Chuck Joiner of MacVoices to share the story behind their new EPUB reader for the Mac, Apple has announced special voluntary audits of Apple suppliers by the Fair Labor Association, our friend Dan Frakes at Macworld has finally figured out how to make a bootable Lion installer for new Macs, Instapaper developer Marco Arment blows the whistle on how apps are allowed free access to your iOS contact and calendar databases, and we learn that iTunes Match really is paying some royalties to copyright holders.

Learn More about Bookle’s Background on MacVoices — Peter Lewis of Stairways Software may be in Australia, but that didn’t stop Chuck Joiner from bringing him together with Adam Engst to talk about their joint release of the Bookle EPUB reader for the Mac. If you want to hear some of the background story about how Bookle came to be, what restrictions are placed on it by the Mac App Store, and how the large companies are using DRM these days, tune into this MacVoices podcast.

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Fair Labor Association to Inspect Apple Suppliers — Following weeks of heated discussion over working conditions that included some protests, Apple announced that it has asked the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to begin special voluntary audits at the company’s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn, Quanta, and Pegatron.

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Action-Packed Instructions for Creating a Bootable Lion Install Drive — Dan Frakes at Macworld details the steps for creating a bootable installer disc or drive for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which is important especially for Macs that debuted after the release of Lion (as they don’t include a downloadable version of the installer). While nicely thorough and practical, it’s also notable for a hair-raising maneuver to avoid re-installing Mac OS X and zapping your Mac’s PRAM.

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Does iOS Give Apps Too Much Access to Your Data? — Instapaper developer Marco Arment says iOS gives him “far too much access to [the data in the user’s] Address Book without forcing a user prompt.” TidBITS staffer Matt Neuburg has said much the same thing in his Programming iOS book: what sense does it make that an app has to pass through all those Core Location permission gateways in order to access your photos, yet can freely and without notice examine, copy, and delete the information in your Contacts and Calendar databases?

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iTunes Match a (Small) Moneymaker for Copyright Holders — Subscribers to Apple’s iTunes Match service are sending copyright holders “magic money,” writes Jeff Price at the blog for the TuneCore online music distribution service. And while not an overwhelming amount ($10,000 in the first two months, spread out across 55,000 TuneCore artists), Price points out that it is more than the null sum that artists were previously receiving.

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