At a glance
- Manuscript upload
- Required
- Cloud storage
- Yes
- Account required
- Yes
- AI features
- Not determined
- AI training on your work
- Terms are silent or ambiguous
- Content licence
- Narrow — scoped to running the service
- Deletion
- Not assessed
- Export / portability
- Not assessed
- Policy transparency
- Difficult to determine
“Not determined” means the documents were read and did not settle it. “Not assessed” means it has not been researched. Neither means “no”.
What this means for authors
Editorial interpretation — Mixed
Some terms protect the author and others do not, or an important question is left unanswered.
On rights, Apple is the strongest of the six: an enumerated agency appointment rather than a content licence, the author left as principal and seller of record, modification bounded to resizing artwork and correcting metadata, contractors held to the same terms. If the question is what Apple may do with the book, the answer is unusually little. The reservations are commercial and they sit outside Apple. Three parity obligations bind what the publisher does elsewhere: supply Apple no less content than any other distributor gets, give Apple no worse usage rules, functionality or quality than any other distributor gets, and deliver new releases to Apple no later than the day they go on sale anywhere in any format including print. A fourth, section 5(b), requires the publisher to cut the Apple price within two days to match a cheaper competing store — limited to new releases in major markets in the local primary language, and enforced as an obligation on the author rather than by Apple repricing the book, which is how Apple can accurately say it does not price match. None of this is unusual for agency distribution and none of it transfers rights. It does mean that “non-exclusive” describes the rights and not the freedom. Transparency is marked difficult because none of it is published: an author cannot read a word of this until they have created an account and, for paid titles, passed identity and banking verification.
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.
AI and model training
The 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.
Sources
Every factual claim above is drawn from these documents.
Official terms
eBook Agency/Commissionaire Distribution AgreementApple Inc.
Accessed 4 September 2026
The binding Paid Books agreement, executed electronically inside iTunes Connect and not publicly reachable; supplied by the site owner from their own account. Source for the 30% commission, the agency and commissionaire appointment, the section 2(b) authorisations, the section 3 publisher obligations including content parity, non-discrimination and same-day New Release delivery, the section 5(b) price-parity obligation, the country lists in sections A and B, delivery to a California server, and the contractor and confidentiality provisions.
Official help centre
Apple Books Publisher User Guide 2.7.3Apple
Accessed 4 September 2026
Source for the iTunes Connect account requirements, the Free and Paid Books agreements, the DBA and pen-name process, EPUB and Multi-Touch formats, the DRM-Free option, worldwide availability for free books, the Vendor ID and ISBN fields, and the 1099-MISC note.
Official help centre
Self-publish an ebook — Apple Books for AuthorsApple
Accessed 4 September 2026
Source for 70% royalties on every ebook regardless of price, no file delivery fees, EPUB and Word as starting formats, no limits on free books, and the absence of third-party ads and paid placement.
Caveats
This is an informational reading of published documents, not legal advice, and it describes what Apple Books’s terms permit and require rather than what the company does in practice. Terms change without announcement. How this is assessed.