Flipbooks AI vs Apple iBooks Author: Where Should Your Book Live Now Apple Has Retired It?

The Short Answer

Choose Flipbooks AI if the book is finished and the job left is getting other people to read it. You export a PDF from whatever still opens your project, upload it, and share one link that works on a phone, a laptop, a Windows machine or an Android tablet, with no app to install and no account for the reader to make. On a paid plan the reader carries your logo and your brand colours instead of ours. This is a publishing step, not a replacement for the app you lost, and it suits a finished book, a catalogue, a course pack, a report or a manual that simply needs to be read.

Choose Apple iBooks Author if you still have a Mac old enough to run it and your book genuinely depends on what it made. It was a real authoring environment: you laid out pages inside it, and you dropped in interactive widgets, review questions, image galleries, video and 3D objects that a flat document cannot reproduce. Nothing here designs a page for you, and nothing here makes a quiz. If you have a working copy and a working Mac, keeping it as your authoring tool and publishing the output somewhere else is a perfectly sensible plan.

Flipbooks AI vs Apple iBooks Author at a Glance

Flipbooks AI wins 8 of these 11 rows, ties none and loses 3. They are rows we picked, so read them that way. The sections below say plainly where Apple iBooks Author is the better buy.

Pricing Compared

There is no price to compare, which is the first honest thing to say. Apple gave iBooks Author away while it existed, and it is not on sale now at any price, so anybody promising you a licence is selling something you should not buy. If your Mac still has a copy that launches, that copy cost you nothing and remains the cheapest authoring tool in this comparison. If it does not, no amount of money brings it back, and the sensible replacements are the ones Apple pointed at when it went.

Flipbooks AI is priced in one place, in US dollars, the same wherever in the world you check from. The free plan keeps three flipbooks live at a time on 1 GB of storage. Starter is $59 a year, annual only, and it removes our small corner mark or swaps your own logo into its place, turns on brand colours for the reader controls, and opens the page turn effects the free plan does not carry. Plus is $14 a month or $108 a year and adds the embed code with its allowed domain list. Ultra is $29 a month or $228 a year and adds background music and a separate password for each reader.

Read that ladder for what it is. Every step buys how the document looks and behaves for the person reading it, and none of it buys authoring. If what you actually lost when iBooks Author went was the ability to lay out pages, our free plan will not fill the hole and neither will the paid ones. Spend on a page design tool first, get a PDF out of it, and treat publishing as the cheap part, because here it is.

What Each Free Plan Really Gives You

A retired app does not have a free plan, so the fair comparison is with what it left behind: files on your disk, and a project format that only one program ever opened properly. That is genuinely free in the sense that nobody can bill you for it, and genuinely fragile in the sense that it depends on a machine and an operating system version you do not control. Anyone who has tried to open a decade old project on a new Mac knows how that story tends to end, and it is the reason this page exists at all.

Our free plan is a publishing allowance rather than an authoring one. You get three flipbooks live at a time on 1 GB, with the magazine page turn effect and a small corner mark on the published document. There is no page cap, so a three hundred page textbook goes up whole. No ads sit beside the reader. Readers never need an account. The flipbook is never listed in any public directory. One shared password is available at no cost. The three flipbook allowance rolls rather than counting for life, so deleting one frees the slot immediately and a free account can publish many more than three documents over a year.

The difference that matters here is durability, and it cuts both ways. A file on your own disk cannot be switched off by a company, which is a real advantage and the main argument for keeping your exports. A hosted link cannot be orphaned by an operating system update, which is the argument for publishing. The answer most former iBooks Author users should land on is both: keep the source project and a PDF export in your own storage, and publish the PDF so people can actually read it. Whichever tool you use, the host is not your archive.

Branding and Watermarks

Neither tool stamps anything across your pages, so clear that worry away first. iBooks Author produced a book that looked exactly as you designed it, with no maker's mark on the content, and Flipbooks AI puts nothing over the pages either. On our free plan there is a small corner mark on the published flipbook, and that is the whole of it.

The branding question is really about the frame around the reading, and the two are opposites. A Multi-Touch book was read inside Apple Books, so the interface belonged to Apple: their app, their controls, their library shelf around your work. That is a good reading experience and it is not yours. A flipbook is a web page, and on a paid plan the frame is yours instead. Starter, at $59 a year, removes the corner mark or replaces it with your own logo and turns on brand colours for the reader controls, so what surrounds your pages matches your palette rather than a platform's.

Be honest about how much that matters before spending anything. For a school handing a textbook to its own students, the reading app's branding is invisible and irrelevant. For a training company sending a course pack to clients, or a publisher whose whole business is the imprint, the frame is part of the product. That second case is the one worth paying for, and it is the only one where we would push at all.

Privacy and Who Can Find Your Flipbook

A file on your Mac is the most private thing in this comparison. Nothing about iBooks Author put your project on the internet by itself: you made a book, and it stayed on the machine until you exported it, sent it to someone or submitted it to a store. If a manuscript must not leave your desk, that model is the answer and no hosted tool improves on it.

Flipbooks AI is link only. A flipbook is never listed in a public directory, never submitted to search by us, and only reachable by someone holding the URL. The free plan allows one shared password. Ultra, at $228 a year, gives each reader a separate password, which is meaningfully better than one code passed around a mailing list because you can tell where a leak came from.

Here is the part that belongs on every honest version of this page: a Flipbooks AI password gates the reader interface, not the file behind it. The document is hosted so a browser can fetch it, and someone determined who holds the link can get at the file whatever the reader interface says. A manuscript under embargo, an unpublished edition, an exam paper or anything with a legal duty attached does not belong in a flipbook, from us or from anyone else in this category. Keep those on your own disk or in a system that grants access per person and can take it away. Publish the things you want widely read, which is most of what an author actually wants.

Embedding and Sharing

Sharing is where the retirement bites hardest. A Multi-Touch book was made to be opened in one reading app on one family of devices, so sending it to someone meant sending a file that needed that app, or pointing them at a store listing. Anyone on Windows or Android, or anyone who just wanted to glance at page four from a phone in a meeting, was out of luck. That was a reasonable design in its day and it is a poor fit for how documents get passed around now.

A flipbook is a URL. It opens in whatever browser the reader already has, resizes to the screen they are holding, starts on page one rather than in a downloads folder, and needs no account, no app and no platform in common with you. That is the single biggest practical gain in the move, and it costs nothing on the free plan.

Embedding is the paid half of this. On Plus, $14 a month or $108 a year, you get an embed code and a list of the domains allowed to frame the flipbook, so the book can live inside your own site or a course page while you keep control of who else may show it. There was no equivalent to that in an authoring app, because an authoring app makes a file rather than publishing a page. If your book belongs on a website you run, that is the row that decides it.

Ease of Use and What Each Tool Is For

iBooks Author was an authoring tool, and a generous one. You typed and laid out inside it, dropped in galleries, video, review questions and 3D objects, previewed on an iPad, and produced something that felt built rather than converted. Nothing in this comparison replaces that, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. If you are looking for its successor as a design environment, look at page layout and word processing tools that export EPUB or PDF, not at us.

Flipbooks AI is the step after design, and it is quicker to say what we do not have. There is no template gallery, no in tool page editor, no custom domains, no team seats, no API, no reader analytics, no lead capture forms and no e-commerce. There is also no import path from anywhere, including from an old iBooks Author project. You upload a finished PDF, choose a page turn effect, set a password or your colours if you are paying, and share the link. That is the whole product, and it takes a couple of minutes.

So the shape most former iBooks Author users end up with is two tools where they used to have one. Something designs the pages, whether that is a word processor, a layout application or the same Mac app if it still runs, and something publishes the result to people who do not share your hardware. If your book cannot survive being flattened, because the quizzes and the widgets were the point, then this pairing does not work for you and an interactive course platform is the honest recommendation instead.

Who Should Choose Which

Choose Flipbooks AI if

• Your book is finished and you need one link that opens for readers on any device
• You want your own logo and brand colours around the pages, from $59 a year
• You need the book embedded in a site you control, with an allowed domain list, on Plus at $108 a year
• Your readers are not all on Apple devices and you are tired of explaining which app they need

Choose Apple iBooks Author if

• You still have a Mac that runs it and a project file it opens
• The interactive widgets, review questions or 3D objects are the reason the book works
• You want to keep authoring offline, with the files on your own disk and nobody hosting anything
• You are publishing into Apple Books specifically and that store is where your readers already are

How to Switch from Apple iBooks Author to Flipbooks AI

The move is really a rescue, and the order matters because the hardest part is getting a clean file out of a program that no longer ships. Do the exports while the old machine still works, not later.

1. Find a machine that still opens the project. Track down the Mac with a working copy before anything else, and check that the project file opens and looks right. If it does not, look for the last PDF or the last book file you exported, because that may now be your only usable master. Copy everything to a drive you keep, including images and video you originally imported.
2. Export a clean PDF, at the size the book was designed at. Use the export the old app gives you rather than a screenshot or a print to file from a preview, so the text stays sharp and any internal links survive. If you have already moved the manuscript into a word processor or a layout tool, export from there instead, since that file is the one you will keep editing.
3. Write down what does not survive the flattening. Quizzes, review questions, image galleries, embedded video, audio and 3D objects become static pages or vanish. Note the page each one sat on, decide whether it can become a picture with a caption, a link to a video, or a separate exercise, and accept that some books should not be flattened at all.
4. Upload the PDF to Flipbooks AI and set it up. Drop the file on the create page, pick a page turn effect, add a password if the book is not for the public, and set your own logo and brand colours if you are on a paid plan. Preview it on a phone as well as a laptop, and remember the free plan keeps three flipbooks live at a time with the magazine effect.
5. Repoint everything, then keep your archive. Update the course pages, the email signatures, the QR codes and the store links that pointed at the old book. Keep the project file and the PDF in your own storage afterwards, because a published flipbook is a copy for readers and your own file is what you would rebuild from.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Apple iBooks Author still available, and was it free to use?

It was free while Apple distributed it, and it is not available now. Apple retired the app and has pointed authors at Pages since, so there is no download, no licence to buy and no updates coming. If a website offers you a copy, treat that with suspicion. What you may still have is a working installation on an older Mac, which is worth protecting: back up the machine and the project files before an operating system update makes the decision for you.

What does Apple suggest people use instead of iBooks Author?

Apple pointed authors at Pages when the app was retired, and for most books that is the sensible successor, because it writes and lays out pages and exports formats other people can open. It is a different shape of tool, so expect to rebuild rather than convert. Flipbooks AI is not an alternative to either of them: we take the finished PDF and publish it as a link that turns pages, which is the step after whatever you write in.

Can I still open my old iBooks Author project files?

Only on a machine with a working copy of the app, which is why the first step in the switch is finding one. The project format was specific to that program and nothing else reads it properly, so a project sitting on a drive with no compatible Mac left is effectively locked. If you have any doubt about the machine, export a PDF now and store it somewhere ordinary, because a PDF will still open in twenty years and a proprietary project file might not.

Can I turn a Multi-Touch book into a flipbook?

Yes, once it is a PDF. Export the book at the size it was designed at, upload the file here, and it becomes a flipbook whose pages turn in a browser. What arrives is the visual book: the layout, the typography, the images and the captions. What does not arrive is anything that had to run, so plan for quizzes, galleries, video, audio and 3D objects to become flat pages. For a textbook that was mostly beautiful pages, the result is very close. For a course built on interaction, it is not.

Do my readers need an Apple device to open a flipbook?

No, and this is usually the reason people move. A flipbook is a web page, so it opens on Windows, Android, ChromeOS, Linux, a phone, a tablet or a laptop, in whatever browser is already there. Nobody installs an app, nobody signs in, and nobody needs to be on the same platform as you. That is a bigger practical change than any feature on our pricing page, and it costs nothing on the free plan.

Will my interactive widgets survive the move?

No. A flipbook is a paginated document, so anything that ran inside the old book stops being interactive when the file is flattened. The usual workarounds are to replace a gallery with the best single image, to caption a video still with a link to the video, and to move quizzes to a form or a course tool that people can actually submit. If most of your pages depend on widgets, be honest with yourself: an interactive learning platform is the right recommendation and we are not it.

Is a flipbook the same thing as an EPUB?

No, and the difference is worth knowing before you choose. An EPUB reflows, so the text rewraps to the reader's screen and font size, which suits a novel. A flipbook keeps the page exactly as designed and turns it, which suits a textbook, a catalogue, a magazine or anything where the layout carries meaning. If your book is mostly running text and you want readers to set their own type size, an EPUB from a word processor is the better outcome and a flipbook is the wrong shape.

Can I sell a flipbook the way a book could be sold in a store?

Not through us. Flipbooks AI has no e-commerce, no storefront, no checkout and no rights management, so there is nothing here that takes payment from your readers. What we give you is a link, optionally behind a password, and on Ultra a separate password for each reader at $228 a year, which is enough to hand a paid course pack to a known list of buyers. If you want a shop with payments and distribution, sell through a store or a platform that handles it and use a flipbook for the free sample.

Can I import an iBooks Author project into Flipbooks AI?

No, and no tool of ours reads that format. A flipbook is built from a source document, so the path is always export a PDF, then upload the PDF, which takes about a minute per book. Nothing about the project structure, the widgets or the metadata travels with it. That sounds like a limitation and mostly is not, because for a finished book the PDF is the thing readers want, and keeping the project file is your job rather than ours either way.

Was Apple iBooks Author a good tool?

It was very good, and its retirement is a real loss rather than an opportunity for us. It gave individual authors and teachers a serious page layout environment for nothing, with interactive widgets that most publishing software still does not match, and books made in it looked better than they had any right to. Anyone telling you a flipbook replaces it is overselling. What a flipbook does is take the finished pages and make them readable by anybody with a browser, which is the one thing that old workflow was worst at.