It was announced, under the name iBooks, in conjunction with the iPad on January 27, 2010,[2] and was released for the iPhone and iPod Touch in mid-2010, as part of the iOS 4 update.

[3] Initially, iBooks was not pre-loaded onto iOS devices, but users could install it free of charge from the iTunes App Store.

On June 10, 2013, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Craig Federighi announced that iBooks would also be provided with OS X Mavericks in Fall 2013.

[7][8] On January 19, 2012, at an education-focused special event in New York City, Apple announced the free release of iBooks 2, which can operate in landscape mode and allows for interactive reading.

[15] It features a new variation of the San Francisco typeface known as "SF Serif",[16] which was later revealed to be released in six optical weights under the "New York" name.

[18] On April 8, 2010, Apple announced that iBooks would be updated to support the iPhone and iPod Touch with iOS 4.

[3] On June 8, 2010 at the WWDC Keynote it was announced that iBooks would be updated that month to read PDF files as well as have the ability to annotate both PDFs and eBooks.

Upon its release for older devices running iOS 4, such as the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch, iBooks received criticism for its slow performance.

The patent describes how a user can select the appealing e-book snippet that will bring up a contextual menu containing an option to gift the media to another party.

Available English fonts are Baskerville, Cochin, Georgia, Palatino, Times New Roman, Verdana, Athelas, Charter, Iowan Old Style and Seravek.

In Scroll, there is no page turning, and the book appears as continuous text, read vertically like a web browser.

[40] This was quickly picked up and disseminated by rumor sites and eventually mainstream media outlets as revelation of features of the iPad.

McGraw Hill was not included in the iPad presentation at the Apple media event and there was speculation that the exclusion was in response to this release of information.

"[43] Due to the 30% revenue share that Apple receives from the in-app purchase mechanism, the financial viability of competing bookstore apps run by other book retailers is uncertain, even though in many countries, the Apple Books Store still does not provide consumers access to any e-books except for free works, such as ones that are in the public domain.

[44] Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson that:[13] The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt.

The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.After Jobs's death, in 2012, Apple released iBooks 2, which added support for interactive textbooks on the iPad.

These textbooks can display interactive diagrams, audio, video, quizzes, HTML, and 3D content,[46][14][47] and support highlights, notes, and annotations, which can be viewed in an "index card"-like interface.

[48] Apple simultaneously released a free Mac app, iBooks Author, which could be used to create these interactive textbooks in WYSIWYG fashion.

[48] iBooks Author introduced two proprietary file formats: TechRadar's Steve Paris called iBooks Author "incredibly simple to use", but noted a few bugs in the first public release, and criticized the fact that it only supported H.264 video files, despite iPads being compatible with more formats.

[52] iBooks Author's license agreement was controversial upon release, for stating that documents created with the tool could only be sold for a fee if they were accepted and exclusively distributed by Apple.

[56] Its proprietary file format was also criticized by Ed Bott of ZDNet, who compared it to Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy.

[14] Notable books created using iBooks Author include How to Say Cheese, Physics in Motion, NASA's Destination: Jupiter.

However, as of 2020, Pages only supported image galleries, videos, and audio, and lacked iBooks Author's more advanced features.