Apple says it will discontinue iBooks Author, which will no longer be updated, in July 2020 and iTunes U, its educational resources portal, at the end of 2021
I have previously written about my frustration With iBooks Author and iTunes U, and Apple has now announced both of these products …
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement extends a decade-long pattern of Apple quietly retiring niche services rather than maintaining them: the iAd App Network shutdown, the end of iTunes Allowances, closing iTunes LP submissions, and discontinuing Photo Print Products while steering users to a third-party alternative.
iBooks Author and iTunes U were pillars of Apple's education pitch — the same program Apple overhauled in 2015 when it removed the Apple ID requirement for large school deployments. Killing both signals the company is exiting self-published textbook creation and curated course portals entirely, leaving those jobs to others.
First-order effects
- Educators and authors who built interactive textbooks in iBooks Author lose their creation tool when updates stop in July 2020, and schools using iTunes U as their course-content portal have until the end of 2021 to migrate.
Second-order effects
- Following the Photo Print Products precedent, demand shifts to third-party authoring and course-hosting tools, since Apple is offering no successor of its own.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's education strategy consolidates around hardware, apps, and managed deployments rather than first-party content tools — meaning institutions should treat any Apple side-service as having an expiration date.
The trend: Apple is steadily pruning niche authoring and content services — iAd, iTunes LPs, Photo Print Products, now iBooks Author and iTunes U — to concentrate on its core platform and hardware business.