Years ago, Apple launched a major offensive to secure a piece of the digital book market: an app that allowed anyone to create highly professional e-books. Special target group: the educational materials market. I can still picture the promotional video with children carrying ton-heavy print books to school in their backpacks – all of this was supposed to improve with the digital teaching materials from iBooks Author.
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I was amazed at the time by the possibilities Apple offered: in the digital books, text could not only be formatted as easily and well as in any professional word processing program. No, there was also the option to incorporate interactions: single and multiple-choice questions, HTML components, video, audio, 3D objects, image galleries… It truly offered a lot of added value compared to the printed book.
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My disillusionment came quickly. Not because the functions weren’t good. They worked great, there was nothing to shake at Apple. My frustration was the lack of import and export options. I had to more or less start and rewrite my book in iBooks Author. This didn’t correspond to reality – the books often already existed in printed or laid-out form. However, importing from InDesign, Word, or Pages wasn’t possible at the time.
And then the export: there was a proprietary format and it only worked in the Apple world. Strategically, this probably made sense for Apple, but unfortunately not in everyday life.
Better, but Never Good
Although these missing import and export functions were added over the years, iBooks Author didn’t receive much love from Apple in recent years. The e-book topic was expanded (Books Store and App), but unfortunately not the authoring. Rather, it became apparent that the in-house word processing software Pages was now supposed to take over the creation of digital books.
Is Apple Leaving the Education Market?
So yesterday came the announcement that iBooks Author will be taken out of circulation. They promise an import option into Pages, which at least gives hope that the innovative functions of the Author will continue to live on in Pages.
Nevertheless, it’s a shame, because authoring systems for digital books are rare. They exist, but they are usually workflow apps that convert a print layout to EPUB. Adobe InDesign masters this path, various online converters are also available for this. Unfortunately, the added value of digital books always falls flat. Entirely new worlds of experience would be possible, which simply cannot be created from a print layout. Fortunately, EPUB is ultimately nothing more than HTML and CSS. And with that, the savvy coder can conjure up something clever even without a dedicated authoring program.
P.S: Discontinuing iBooks Author is one step, giving up iTunes U is another. Apparently, Apple is withdrawing from the education market and leaving the field to others. Or planning something completely new. We shall see.
