Apple’s free interactive book creation app iBooks Author was just released, allowing for anyone to make multi-touch iBooks for iPad. Unfortunately it’s officially for Mac OS X 10.7 only, and if you try to install it on Snow Leopard, you’ll get an error message. With a little work we can get around that error message and install and run iBooks Author in Mac OS X 10.6.8.

This is not supported by Apple, although the app appears to work fine and if you just want to explore the application it’s more than enough. If you plan on publishing with iBooks Author, you should use OS X Lion though.

From the Mac OS X desktop, hit Command+Shift+G and enter /System/Library/CoreServices/

Locate SystemVersion.plist and make a backup copy of it to the desktop

Launch the Terminal and type the following:

sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist Locate the keys ProductUserVisibleVersion and ProductVersion and change their strings from “10.6.8” to “10.7.2”

Hit Control+O to save the file

Now launch the Mac App Store and find and download iBooks Author

After iBooks Author is finished downloading – do not launch it yet, instead open /Applications/ and find the app, then right-click on it and choose “Show Package Contents”

Now open the folder “Contents” and locate and open “Info.plist”, you can use nano or your favorite text editor

In Info.plist, look for “LSMinimumSystemVersion” and change the accompanying string from “10.7.2” to “10.6.8” and safe the file

Almost done! Now go back to the SystemVersion.plist file and open it again:

sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist Locate keys ProductUserVisibleVersion and ProductVersion again, but change their strings from to “10.7.2” back to “10.6.8”

Save SystemVersion.plist

Launch iBooks Author

The iBooks Author icon will probably keep it’s strike through it, but the app opens fine and everything seems to work. You may also need to upgrade to iTunes 10.5.3 if you want to sync the iBooks to an iPad.