Best way to retain access to iBooks Author

[cityfarmer (Mike Levenston)]

My beloved 2017 iMac recently crashed – the hard drive died. The machine ran OS Catalina 10.15.7 which is the last OS that supports iBooks Author, the fantastic discontinued Apple program which makes all my published books. What to do? The new silicon chips won’t support Catalina.

My local Vancouver BC Apple shop took it in and their tech support pulled out the failed SSD from the iMac, attached a larger, very fast Kingston 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD in a Satechi Enclosure to the back of the iMac (strapped to the stand), installed OS Catalina on the new drive, migrated my data from my Time Machine backup. Voila! My iMac runs much faster now with the latest SSD. The hard drive is doubled in size. I still have the beautiful 27inch 5K Apple screen and the cost was low! $369 Canadian [US $271]

[josehill]

@cityfarmer

The machine ran OS Catalina 10.15.7 which is the last OS that supports iBooks Author, the fantastic discontinued Apple program which makes all my published books. What to do?

Make sure you keep up with your backups, and try to keep your Internet activities to a minimum, using a browser that is actively being maintained on Catalina, i.e., Firefox. Glad to hear you were able to recover from the drive failure!

[trilo]

@cityfarmer

the last OS that supports iBooks Author, the fantastic discontinued Apple program which makes all my published books. What to do?

Once upon a time in a far off land, I made a book in iBooks Author - and whilst it could be a bit finicky it was very capable.

I believe most of the functionality has been rolled into Pages and I think iBook Author files can be opened (although I haven’t tried). I’m just starting a new book project so I must check it out.