What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is a digital book authoring platform built on the popular WordPress publishing and blogging website. If you have used WordPress in the past, Pressbooks should feel familiar. Pressbooks is online software that enables authors and publishers to design and format any kind of book, including:

• PDF: for print or print on demand
• EPUB: for Apple iBooks, Nook, Kobo, Kindle and most other ebook platforms
• Webbook: private or public

Pressbooks is an open-source publishing platform used by independent authors, small and medium-sized publishers, and educational institutions around the world. Advantages include:

• Templates that are optimized to look great in a wide variety formats and meet accessibility standards
• File exports suited to Kindles, phones, and iPads for ebooks, as well as print
• Users have unlimited ability to edit, update, and (re)export their book projects
• Users can easily collaborate with other authors and editors
• Metadata fields support OER licencing and attribution standards
• Pedagogues have the option to include interactive and multimodal content to encourage learning
• Daily backups

Our Pressbooks User Guide (published by Concordia University Library) provides help for various parts of the textbook production process on Pressbooks and includes chapters ranging across many aspects of adopting, customizing, or creating an Open Educational Resource (OER) in Pressbooks. Each section of this guide begins with a list of topics covered in its chapters. This guide does not come with an index. Instead, use the search field located in the top-right of each page in the online version to locate a specific topic.

This guide is an ongoing resource, so we will update it as needed. Each chapter will include a “Last update” posted at the top of the page.

If you have questions that are not addressed in our user guide, you can check the following resources: