Apple faces $5 billion class action lawsuit regarding eBook availability (2025)

A lawsuit filed in California this week claims Apple breached the state’s false advertising and consumer protection laws by deliberately deceiving customers into believing they’re buying eBooks outright through the Apple Books app, when in reality, they’re only getting revocable licenses to access them.

Joe Rossignol for MacRumors:
‎

The proposed class action complaint explains that Apple is required to pull a digital book or audiobook from the Apple Books app if and when it loses a license to that content, resulting in the content no longer being available in the app’s store. As a result, the complaint alleges that some customers have unexpectedly found that digital books they previously purchased were no longer available to re-download, despite having paid for them. Apple removes books without warning, and without providing refunds, the complaint adds.

‎
MacDailyNews Take: As Rossignol notes, when setting up an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or other Apple device, users are required to agree to Apple’s various software license agreements, all of which state the following:

Purchased Content will generally remain available for you to download, redownload, or otherwise access from Apple. Though it is unlikely, subsequent to your purchase, Content may be removed from the Services and become unavailable for further download or access from Apple (for instance, because Apple loses its right from the Content provider to make it available). To ensure your ability to continue enjoying Content, we encourage you to download all purchased Content to a device in your possession and to back it up.

‎
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!

Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.