Authors can no longer publish to Apple Books directly from Pages

Five years after it gave up on its iBooks Author app, Apple is now removing the ability for Pages to send books straight to the Apple Books store.
Pages for Mac still has the menu option for publishing to Apple Books, but now it just means export to ePub
Initially, Apple made a big deal of its original iBooks Author app in 2012, and how it let users create richly formatted books they could then immediately sell on its then iBooks Store. Only, iBooks Author had bugs, and Apple retired it in June