Apple Books

Publishing terms

Formats

EPUB, Multi-Touch (.ibooks), PDF

Distribution

Apple Books store, Volume Content Service (institutional bulk purchase)

Territories

Paid or free distribution in 51 named countries; free distribution only everywhere else

Exclusivity

Not requiredApple is appointed as a non-exclusive agent, or commissionaire in the countries where it sells in its own name. But non-exclusive is not the same as unconstrained, and three obligations reach outside Apple. The publisher must make available to Apple no less than the content it supplies to any other digital distributor, must not give Apple worse usage rules, functionality or quality than any other distributor gets, and must deliver a New Release to Apple no later than the day it goes on sale anywhere in any format, including print.

ISBN

Free ISBN supplied: NoAccepts your own ISBN: YesThe publisher guide’s metadata table marks Vendor ID as the required field — a unique, permanent number identifying the title, which should match the ISBN where one exists — and does not mark the ISBN itself as required. The constraint that matters is timing rather than necessity: an ISBN must be supplied with the initial submission and cannot be added to a title afterwards.

Royalties

• 70% of list priceEbook royaltyExpressed in the agreement as its inverse: Apple takes a commission of 30% of the Customer Price, net of taxes in some territories and gross of them in others. There are no bands and no thresholds — the rate does not move with price. Apple is entitled to its commission on delivery of the ebook even where it cannot collect the price from the buyer.

Fees

• Account and file delivery — freeSigning up is free and Apple states there are no file delivery fees. An Apple ID with a valid credit card on file is required to create the iTunes Connect account, and selling requires completing the Paid Books agreement, which Apple verifies before approving. Delivery of content files is at the publisher’s expense, to a server in California.

Payment schedule

Not established. The commission, tax and reporting clause was read, but the payment cadence and any minimum threshold were not located in the sections reviewed, and Apple does not publish them.

Rights & privacy

Manuscript upload

Required

Cloud storage

Yes

Account required

Yes

AI features

Not determined

AI training on your work

The terms are unclearThe agreement does not mention AI, machine learning or training anywhere — the same silence as Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. What distinguishes Apple’s silence is the shape of the grant around it. Apple is not given a broad licence to use the work; it is authorised to do an enumerated list of things, all of them plainly in service of selling and delivering the book. Where modification is permitted it is bounded almost to the point of pedantry: artwork may be modified only by “resizing or cropping” to fit a promotional space, and metadata only as reasonably necessary to correct errors. That is a narrower footing than a general-purpose licence, and nothing in it reads naturally as covering model training. But narrow is not the same as excluded, and the agreement does not exclude it.

Content licence

The narrowest grant of the six records here, and structurally different from the others: Apple is appointed as the publisher’s non-exclusive agent — or commissionaire, selling in its own name but on the publisher’s behalf, in the countries listed for that — rather than taking a licence as a reseller. The author remains the principal and the seller of record. What Apple is authorised to do is enumerated: market and sell the book, deliver free previews, copy and format and store content files as necessary to make them downloadable, provide storage, search and hosting, issue receipts, support re-downloads for buyers who lose their copy, use artwork and metadata for promotion with modification limited to resizing and cropping, and do what is reasonably necessary to fulfil that appointment. Apple may use contractors, but only under terms no less restrictive than its own, and it remains responsible for them. Apple may also not pledge, mortgage or otherwise encumber the materials supplied to it.

Policy reviewed 4 September 2026