We recently talked about the curse of free software at Apple, and sometimes I hate to agree, Apple has decided to start the summer cleanup by pruning applications that don't have a clear path to expansion.
The first notification was that of iBooks Author, the revolution that Apple has brought to digital books, promoting multimedia creation and “enriched” content.
This is what Apple states in its communication:
Thank you for being a member of the iBooks Author community. We have news we want to share with you about the future of book making.
Two years ago, we incorporated book creation into Pages. With amazing features like being able to do this on the iPad, collaborating with others on a shared book, drawing with Apple Pencil, and more, Pages is a great platform for creating books.
As we are focusing our efforts on Pages, iBooks Author will not be updated and will soon disappear from the Mac App Store. You will be able to continue using iBooks Author on macOS 10.15 and earlier, and books already published on Apple Books will still be available.
If you have iBooks Author books that you want to import into Pages so you can continue working on them, we'll be adding a book import tool to Pages soon.
We are excited about the future of book creation in Pages, and we hope you are too. For more information, visit the support page.
The Apple Books team
Let's hope it's for the best, even if it won't be the same ...
