Here’s a cool concept video for page-turning techniques in ebooks, which rather puts the current offerings to shame.

It shows an e-book behaving much more like a paper book, thanks to new ways of recognizing finger taps and swipes.

A smattering of journalist authors are freaking out over Apple’s license agreement for the free new iBooks Author tool.

ZDnet’s Ed Bott called the license agreement “greedy and evil.” PCmag.com’s Sascha Segan wrote: “Like iBooks Author? Apple now owns you.” Even Daring Fireball’s John Gruber called it “Apple at its worst.”

Et tu, Gruber?

What’s strange about these emotional responses to Apple’s legalese is that they fail the reality test. Apple’s iBooks Author terms are neither greedy nor evil; they don’t mean Apple’s “owns you;” and it’s certainly not the worst thing Apple has ever done.

Here. I’ll prove it.

Laaaaaaaaaaadies and Gentlemen, welcome to Friday Night Fights, a new series of weekly deathmatches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?

After this week’s topic, someone’s going to be spitting teeth. Our question: Which is better? Android’s three virtual buttons or iOS’s physical home button?

In one corner, we have the 900 pound gorilla, Cult of Mac; in the opposite corner, wearing the green trunks, we have the plucky upstart, Cult of Android!

Place your bets, gentlemen! This is going be a bloody one.

If you’re a Dropbox user, uploading images to your Dropbox account directly from your iOS devices can be incredibly handy. And with QuickShot ($1.99), it couldn’t easier. Simply link the app to your Dropbox account and images are automatically uploaded as you snap them.

This is great if you often use public computers and you need to upload multiple images, but you don’t want to send them all via email. You can also use the app as alternative to Photo Stream. Sure, Photo Stream’s great, but until Apple allows us to delete our photos individually, it’s not ideal for everyone.

By uploading your images to Dropbox instead, you have access to them on pretty much all of your internet-connected devices. Here’s how to get setup with QuickShot!

I cried like a kindergartener on the first day of school when I watched Water For Elephants. Sure, while I was really sad about the elephant, most of my tears were spilled for Robert Pattinson because he’s so stinking dreamy. Even so, the film opened my eyes to the plight of the big top pachyderm. Compared to me and Robert Pattinson, PETA is about a year late to the scene, but they’ve recently released a new iOS game that gives tortured circus elephants the last laugh while also raising awareness of animal cruelties by raining down horror on humans. Sounds like fun, huh?

Psychotherapist Marcos Quinones has got streamlining a one-man office down to a science.

Quinones, a former software developer, is a New York City-based cognitive behavioral therapist and licensed clinical social worker who runs his entire office on Apple gear.

He credits the iPad with making a big impact in the smooth running of his sole practice.

As part of our continuing series about businesses using the iPad, he shares a few key apps that help him process payments and help with patient records, saving time and money.

The Raspbery Pi project is a darling little exercise in ingenuity. It looks like a USB thumb drive, but instead of 2GB of flash, it’s a fully functional computer running Debian Linux, featuring a 700 MHz ARM 11 processor, 128 MB of RAM, a USB port, and an Ethernet port… all for just $35. Splendid, splendid geekiness. Hanging this from your car keys, you can literally get connected anywhere. But where’s the Apple angle?

Try this one for size: it supports AirPlay.

After a red-hot introduction and a hectic holiday period that left Apple looking over its shoulder, orders for Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire tablet are slowing, cut in half to 3 million units for the first quarter of 2012, Friday reports claim. During the last three months of 2011, around 6 million of the devices flew off the shelves, making it Amazon’s best-selling product.

Back in 2004, I couldn’t afford $499 for an iPod, so instead I got a 20GB Dell DJ for $299. Honestly, it wasn’t a bad little MP3 player, but it looked like it had been designed by some sort of extraordinary, irradiated orangutan toiling away in the bowels of the Kremlin during the Soviet electronics revolution of the late 1980s. I realize that analogy doesn’t make any sense, but just look at the design and button placement on this thing, and all will become clear.

My DJ lasted me quite a few years, but when I finally upgraded to an 80GB iPod Classic in 2006, I breathed a sigh of relief. The lesson? Accept no substitutes.

On that note, here’s the latest bizarre Communist clone of a popular Apple gadget: the Red Pad, named after the only book a loyal Maoist ever needed in the 1960s-era Chinese Communist Party, his Little Red Book. It looks just like an iPad, but it’s tailored specifically to run apps compatible with China’s massive state propaganda machine. Oh, and it costs twice as much as an iPad 2!

The only problem? After poor reviews, the Chinese government has wiped out all mention of its existence.

Having been promised just over a week ago that an untethered jailbreak for Apple’s A5 powered devices was “just a matter of days away,” we were all expecting to see Cydia and all sorts of fancy tweaks installed on our devices by now. But of course, these things take time. After all, we want a smooth and reliable experience when we come to jailbreak our most prized possessions.

While the exploit still isn’t quite ready for public release, it’s certainly very close. Pod2g has issued further details on his team’s work, revealing that all the “technical hurdles” have already been overcome, and that they are just ironing out the final bug fixes before the hack goes live.