Apple would do well to clarify this a bit, since a few scoundrels like Ed Bott 
(constant Apple troll) have got people very confused and some believe that if 
you use this tool, you lose all control over the next 'Great American Novel'.

On Jan 21, 2012, at 10:21 AM, Kevin Callahan wrote:

> 1) Do you still "own" the copyrights to your work if you publish to 
> iBookstore? ( or is it that Apple owns the copyrights to the book in THAT 
> format?)

Apple doesn't get any copyright at all, in any circumstance. Just publisher 
rights.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9028628/iBooks-Author-Apple-doesnt-want-to-own-your-book.html

Also, from the EULA section on copyright:

Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or 
accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner.

> 2) If you publish to iBookstore via the iBooks format, can you ALSO export to 
> PDF or Text or use your same SOURCE material to publish to another format and 
> sell elsewhere?
> (just as we can if we sell an app in the App Store and the same app via 
> eSellerate or other...) 

Source material, yes. Output from iBooks Author, no. The grey area seems to 
surround some uses, for instance if you did all the actual writing in iBooks 
Author. The conspiracy theorists like to think Apple wants to own your stuff 
but there's no evidence of that in the documents they've published.

The goal appears to be to provide a tool to create iBookstore content. It's an 
iBook maker, not an ebook maker. You can export to PDF but not to sell, only to 
give away for free. It's more like the iOS App Store in that way - a single 
point of distribution where if you decide to sell, you give up 30%. The iOS App 
Store has binary compatibility to prevent your apps working elsewhere but if 
that wasn't a technical limit, you can bet that there would be a similar EULA 
provision for selling your apps too. The MAS is an outlier since external 
distribution is so de-facto in the Desktop software world.

This FAQ from Apple should be more fleshed out to eliminate the confusion: 
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5071
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