You said:

My problem with O'reilly's use of the word "hacks" in its book titles is that often the "hacks" contained within aren't really "hacks". They're just your run of the mill tips.

Well, I own, at last count, around 160 titles either published or distributed by O'Reilly and I beg to differ. The problem you are having seeing the majority of the 100 hacks in an O'Reilly hack book may be that you do own a lot of O'Reilly titles and have been around a while and know a fair mount. One man's 'tip' is my 12 year old daughter's 'hack'. Indeed, I often run books past her when writing reviews for just that reason. She often finds a particular tip a 'miraculous hack' that I thought was patently obvious.

One of the things I have to remind myself, particularly when looking at a book on the iPod, is that a vast majority of the people who buy and use these things spend almost all their computing time word proccessing, dealing with email and browsing the web - all without ever reading a manual or being interested in the computer underneath at all.

In a shrinking technical book market O'Reilly's just making sure that they have book buyers - people who could care less about Perl but would love to know some fun stuff to do with their iPod.

Tony