Apple is Discontinuing iBooks Author on 1 July
Apple sent out an email yesterday to iBooks Author users, informing them that the nine-year-old macOS app will be discontinued on 1 July, and removed from the App Store.
From the email:
Thank you for being a member of the iBooks Author community. We have some news to share with you about the future of book creation.
Two years ago we brought book creation into Pages. With key features such as the ability to work on iPad, collaborate with others on a shared book, draw with Apple Pencil, and more, Pages is a great platform for making books.
As we focus our efforts on Pages, ?iBooks? Author will no longer be updated and will soon be removed from the Mac App Store. You can continue to use ?iBooks? Author on macOS 10.15 and earlier, and books previously published to Apple Books will remain available. If you have ?iBooks? Author books you’d like to import into Pages for further editing, we have a book import feature coming to Pages soon.
I have long expected this move. Now that Apple has a browser-based publishing portal and a has added ebook creation features to Apple Pages, iBooks Author has mostly become redundant. (Plus, the fact that Apple never changed the apps name from iBooks Author to Books Author told us everything we needed to know about the app’s future.)
On a related note, Apple is also retiring iTunes U. That app will be supported until the end of 2021.
Comments
Aaron June 15, 2020 um 11:10 am
Well that’s a bummer, but in all honesty it always felt like a beta product, like they developed it enough to say they hadn’t forgotten about it but each release always felt it was lacking features. It could have been a really great product, had they invested a little more into it and instead of ignoring the the iBA book developer community, listened to what they were needing to push it further.
Nate Hoffelder June 15, 2020 um 11:43 am
I am surprised they didn’t kill it sooner, actually. It was pretty obvious by about 2015 that Apple’s e-textbook revolution wasn’t going to happen, and that investing in a custom textbook for iBooks just wasn’t worth it.