What can I not do in Pages that I could do in iBooks Author? What are the reasons for these differences? Are they due to limitations in the current EPUB standards or are they due to an Apple business decision?
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Read Apple's Import your iBooks Author book into Pages for Mac - Apple Support article, particular the iBooks Author features that aren't compatible with Pages. Any reasons or business decisions are solely known by the Pages product team, and they will not be responding in this user-supported public community, nor can I speculate about them.
Pages has an export (translate) feature that generates an EPUB3 document. No one here knows what EPUB3 features it presently supports or what Apple may add in the future.
Read Apple's Import your iBooks Author book into Pages for Mac - Apple Support article, particular the iBooks Author features that aren't compatible with Pages. Any reasons or business decisions are solely known by the Pages product team, and they will not be responding in this user-supported public community, nor can I speculate about them.
Pages has an export (translate) feature that generates an EPUB3 document. No one here knows what EPUB3 features it presently supports or what Apple may add in the future.
To ask Apple to add the features you want to see in Pages, you can use
(Whether all the things which iBA used to be able to do are supported by the Epub standard I don't know. For sure books created with the many "non-pub" templates in iBA could not be read by anything other than the Apple Books app.)
I did read the Apple support article cited above prior to posting my question. Indeed, it was the vagueness of that explanation that prompted me to come here where I hoped to find people conversant with Pages, iBooks Author and the EPUB standard. The predominant recommendation in that document was to make a linear QuickTime movie instead of something that behaved interactively in iBooks Author. If Pages does not do the interactive things that the EPUB standard supports then that is clearly an Apple business decision. Such things can be inferred with a modicum of reflection.
What can I not do in Pages that I could do in iBooks Author?
