When Apple first released their incredible new iBooks authoring tool (called — wait for it — iBooks Author) there was a fair amount of scandal that the EULA included provisions that gave Apple exclusive publishing rights to the book. It meant authors couldn’t publish their books in iBook and the Kindle Store at the same time, for example.
We were skeptical from the start that this was what Apple meant. In fact, it seemed pretty clear to us that Apple misspoke in the EULA, and only meant to keep people from using iBooks Author formatted e-books on other platforms, not the actual content inside.
But if there’s still any doubt, Apple has gone ahead and clarified EULA, making it even clearer that they don’t claim your content to own, nor do they care if you sell your book on another store: you just can’t sell it in iBooks Author format elsewhere. Seems fair enough to me.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
10 responses to “Apple Clarifies EULA For iBooks Author: No, We Don’t Want To Steal Ownership Of Your Books”
I’m sorry but no. Exactly the same problem remains, just not the additional problem that a few worried about unnecessarily.
Yes, Apple doesn’t own the content, but it restricts your use of the outputted file. This still sucks!
I, and many others, want the option to use this great software (and it really is fantastic), but on the same terms as we use Photoshop, or Pages, or InDesign. Sell us it, we’ll even pay! I’ll give my CC right now!
But as usual with Apple, it’s “our way or the highway”.
Sigh.
Is the file format that iBooks Author exports even compatible with other publishing systems anyway?
No.
I recently published my first edition of Haunted America using apple’s authoring tool, now from my experience the tool itself is great, layouts easy, really like what I’m used to using so i was comfortable right off the bat. That being said the limitations leave me looking for other alternatives. Here are a few examples: one, no iPods ,, why is this? Two no page flip of content, now its a slide. to me this is more like a web experience than a book experience. Also, if I do decided to publish to the kindle fire i have to figure a way to get all my video, audio content in a format that will work for an epub format. so i have to in essence make two different books…so double the work, I get apple I’m a old apple fan from way back, but some latitude would be nice, the output file choices should not be some limited, ill agree on that. Â
Also why oh way no newsstand software yet? publishing to the newsstand is only for the big hitters at this point…. I’m a developer and even making a news stand app is very frustrating. Apple hear my calls!Â
Not sure what you mean. Â You can still sell a book created in iBook Author, just not one exported in .iba format. You can create a PDF and sell it, not that it would be exciting to do so. This is like using Xcode to produce an app. You can take your source code, put it in Eclipse, tweak/port it and then create an Android app. Apple is not going to give you software to enable a competitor. What we are seeing, and I admit it is somewhat painful, is the blurring of the line between content and infrastructure. Is an app that is just a book bundled in Objective C really an app? Â Is a book that has Javascript in it really a webapp with a fancy “cover”?Â
Is this just not the same as any publisher? If you were to publish your book traditionally, would you not face the same issues, I.e we’ll help you print and market your book but, you have to sell it through us.
People get way too wound up over this stuff. Â Seriously, some of you need to get a life.
People get way too wound up over this stuff. Â Seriously, some of you need to get a life.
I doesn’t export .epub [ http://idpf.org/epub ]. EPUB can be edited with other editors, like Sigil. But you can’t get .epub out of iBooks Author. That makes iBooks Author a black hole from which nothing returns.
The format created doesn’t work with anything but iBooks so even without the EULA you’d be restricted.Â
So go use whatever you want and sell it where you want. What’s the big deal.Â