iBooks Author being discontinued on July 1, Apple encouraging writers to use Pages instead

Tom Sykes Posted On 10/06/2020

Apple has announced that iBooks Author, the free Mac app that allows users to write and format books to be sold on the Apple Books platform, will be discontinued on July 1, encouraging writers to use the Pages app, that now features various tools specifically geared towards book creation.

iBooks Author launched in 2012, offering users a full publishing suite that featured the tools needed to publish both digital and print copies of their written work.

Since its launch, Apple has continually been updating Pages – the company’s word processing application for iOS, macOS and iPadOS – to include many of the features found in iBooks Author, with the now set to be discontinued software noticeably still using the “iBooks” name after Apple rebranded its digital book storefront in 2018 and features a rather old-looking user-interface.

Apple has started to email iBooks Author users today informing them of the change:

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.

Apple says the app will continue to run on macOS 10.15 after it is pulled from the Mac App Store next month and that it plans to add an import feature to Pages to allow books to be imported.