iBooks Author

» see apple.com/ibooks-author as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in january 2012 i was finishing my computer engineering degree and not paying attention to ipad textbook tooling. ibooks author was a product aimed at publishers and teachers in north america, not at students in ankara reading pdfs on a five year old laptop. anyway, the app launched on january 19 '12 at an apple education event at the guggenheim in new york. it was free, mac only, and shipped at the same time as ibooks 2 with new textbook formatting on the reader side.

the pitch was that anyone with a mac could now build an interactive multi-touch textbook for the ipad. the widget palette included image galleries and embedded video, plus quizzes and a 3d model viewer you could rotate with a finger. honestly, the output was a.ibooks file, a proprietary extension of epub3 readable only inside the apple ibooks app on apple hardware. the design templates were attractive enough that the first batch of indie textbooks looked closer to a glossy magazine than to a normal ebook.

for whatever reason, on june 10 2020 apple announced the app would be discontinued on july 1 '20 alongside itunes u. the june press note recommended pages as the successor, with most of the formatting features carried across and epub export added, though the more elaborate widgets did not survive the move (close enough). the final ibooks author release was 2.6.1 from september 24, 2018. by 2020 the product had been in maintenance mode for almost two years.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

the app was a wysiwyg textbook layout tool, closer to indesign for ipad than to a word processor. you started from one of about half a dozen templates, dropped in chapters, and dragged in widgets from a sidebar. anyway, the widget palette covered image galleries and inline video. it also shipped keynote-style review questions and a 3d model viewer. you could embed html via an html widget that wrapped a snippet of code into an interactive object. either way, the output was a single.ibooks file you uploaded to the ibooks store. or you sent it as a free preview, or kept it on your own mac to read on a connected ipad.

~ the eula fight ~

the first version of the ibooks author license said that any.ibooks file created with the app could only be sold for a fee through the ibookstore. you could give it away for free anywhere. you could not sell it elsewhere. honestly, the open source and publishing communities flagged this in the first week as an unprecedented claim on user-generated output. no other authoring tool had ever asserted distribution rights over its own file format. critics framed it as apple charging a tax on a free tool's output.

apple revised the eula about two weeks after launch. the new wording said the for-pay distribution restriction applied only to the.ibooks format itself. any other output the tool produced, pdf or plain epub, was free to sell anywhere. this clarification was enough to quiet the controversy. by the time ibooks author 2 shipped in september 2014, the eula was no longer a story.

~ the long tail ~

either way, ibooks author had a real but small audience. mainly indie textbook authors plus a few university programs that experimented with delivering coursework as multi-touch books in the 2013 to 2017 window. the apple books store carried thousands of titles from independent publishers built in the tool. in fairness, the format did not travel, which limited the publishing math. an ibook with custom widgets could not be sold on amazon kindle or kobo. you were betting on apple's bookstore as the only distribution path.

when the june 2020 announcement landed, apple framed it as a consolidation into pages. the migration path moved most layouts and basic interactivity, dropping the more elaborate widgets. anyway, the.ibooks files already in apple books kept working in the books app on ios and macos for the foreseeable future. the production tool was retired but the catalog stayed readable. for whatever reason this felt like a quieter death than itunes u, which got the same announcement on the same day.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »