Dangerous Change in the iBooks approval process

iBooks Author users who publish their books on the iBooks Store since the beginning remember the long approval time for new books. Originally, it was weeks, sometimes even month to get through the approval process. Luckily that has improved dramatically over time and now it is almost down to a 24h turnaround. to get your book up on the store.

I published over 17 books so far since the beginning of the iBooks Store and I definitely welcome that improvement. However, I just found out the hard way that this improvement comes with a terrible price.

The new procedure:

The faster approval process is (not only) not due to a bigger staff to go through the reviews. Instead, it is due to a changed approval procedure as it was explained to me by the customer support. The reviewer now spends less time going through the books to get it to the store quickly. I don't know the details, but I guess they check the more technical side it if is working and not actually reading through it word by word.

With this less thorough first pass comes obviously a new step. The approval department now picks up books later (maybe if they have more time or something) and checks for any mistakes and then issues a ticket while your book is already on the iBooks Store. Actually, at that moment it is not on the iBooks Store anymore and that is the big potential disaster you should be aware of. If you get issued a ticket, your book get pulled off the store until you submit the changes and it successfully went through a new review process, which could take days. This is bad, really really bad and it just happened to two of of my books.

Out of the blue I got a ticket from the iBooks team for my book "Logic Pro X - How it Works" which is on the online store since 2013 and was updated (and approved) last September. On one page i had misspelled the name "iBook Store" instead of "iBooks Store" and on another page I had a link to the Amazon page of my book asking reader to post a review if they like my book. Of course that was also a no-no (referring a multi-billion dollar company to a competing multi-billion dollar company with a link).

I made the changes right away and had the new version uploaded in an hour. But the the review process took over 2days, after I contacted support and escalated the case. And here is the reason:

At the moment they issued the ticket, my book was not available on the iBooks Store anymore, nothing, not even a mention that it is "temporarily unavailable" like Amazon would do. Customers couldn't find the book, all the links from my website, facebook, twitter, other linked sites, everything was immediately rendered a dead link. Not only did I lose money, I had to deal with emails from customers explaining why they couldn't find the advertised book. Last week it happened with another book when I was out to town for a week and didn't have the files with me. And again, it took 3 days to review the correction that I added an "s" to the iBooks Store.

It is mind boggling that the iBooks Team did't think that through

Why not keep the book online during the update

Why not prioritize the submission (checking two typos took longer than the original review of the book).

I asked the support team to issue a feedback about that so they can correct that procedure. In the meantime, you better watch out for potential new tickets, or did anybody had the same issue already?