Video Essentials: How to Use Pressbooks

Create your account and your first book by registering for an account at Pressbooks.com. If you are ready to create your first book, choose the “Register My Book Now” option as you complete the form.

Book Info and Contributors are available in Pressbooks under the Book Info tab in the left sidebar menu. You can add metadata, such as copyright details, ISBNs, titles, and more, on the Book Info page.

From the Organize page, you can add content and organize your book’s text. To add, edit, or reorganize your text, you can access all of your chapters and content here. On this page, you may see the Front Matter, Chapters, and Back Matter of your book.

There are various ways to import your manuscript or other content into Pressbooks aside from writing directly in Pressbooks using the visual editor. This includes pasting your text into the editor after you’ve copied it from another source, such as a Microsoft Word document or a WordPress website.

Pressbooks offers more than 20 professionally designed book layouts, or “Themes,” that allow you to customize the final look of your book. 

You can choose the ideal theme for your book’s tone from various genres, including science fiction and romance, textbooks, and monographs.

Once logged in to your admin dashboard, select the “Create a Book” button. Enter your selected webbook address and book title. The book title is easily changeable in the future, while the webbook address is more complex.

After creating an account and a book in Pressbooks, the Dashboard is where an author will spend most of their time writing and where links to various tools and functionalities may be found.

Book Info and Contributors are available in Pressbooks under the Book Info tab in the left sidebar menu. You can add metadata, such as copyright details, ISBNs, titles, and more, on the Book Info page.

The dashboard of the Organize menu provides an overview of your book’s structure and content. This view displays the front and back matter, sections, and chapters of your book and serves as the primary editing and rearrangement interface. The display is segmented to present your Front Matter first, followed by all of your book’s Parts and Chapters, and finally, the Back Matter at the bottom.

You can import content into Pressbooks from a variety of different file types using the import tool. After Pressbooks has uploaded and analyzed your import files, you will see a list of the content that Pressbooks can import from your file. Each content block can be imported as a front matter, a chapter, a portion, a back matter, or a glossary term, depending on your preference.

Using Pressbooks, you can quickly “clone” or duplicate any publicly available book from one Pressbooks network to another. A copy of the original book is made when you clone it to your own network. Any Pressbooks book made available online is in the public domain or was written under a Creative Commons license that allows for the unrestricted distribution of derivative works that can be copied.

You can add a new section by navigating to your Book Organization Page. Under the Organize Page in the menu bar, select Add Part. After you’ve established a new section, you can easily add chapters to it by selecting Add Chapter.

Within a chapter, the visual editor is the default editor. It features a simple interface that enables you to see formatting and styling as they are being applied. The interface features a toolbar at the top of the editor, offering a range of options and functions.

You can view your created chapter with either the “View chapter” or the “Preview” option.

The visual editor’s footnote tool can be used to generate footnotes. You can use the Glossary tool to add glossary terms to your webbook or produce a comprehensive list for all formats.

Input fields for alternative text can be found under the Image Format menu.

PowerPoint slides do not readily embed into Pressbooks. However, they can be embedded if the slides are accessible via Google Slides. To enable, go to the Google Slides settings for presentation sharing. Modify the sharing settings to allow anyone with link access. In the Menu, locate the Publish to Web option.

The visual editor allows for the direct drafting of LaTeX equations. Remember that equations won’t appear in the editor with their whole formatting. To check how the equations appear, you can view the webbook or export your files.

For all hosted PressbooksEDU networks, MathJax is active and enabled as the default mathematics rendering solution.

A book can be exported from Pressbooks into a variety of file types. Exporting in all of the “Supported formats” is advised. Some supported formats include PDF (print and digital), EPUB, MOBI, Common Cartridge, etc.

The information on the landing page matches what is available in Pressbooks’ Book Info and Export menu options. On Pressbooks Networks, authors can make various export formats downloadable from the homepage of their webbook. This is especially useful for instructors who want students to be able to download the book in a variety of formats across multiple devices and modalities for both digital and print.

You can choose from a wide range of appearances or themes. There are around 20 premium themes available if you use a Pressbooks-hosted network. The theme will alter your book’s appearance without requiring you to know how to code in any front-end languages.

Pressbooks saves your work automatically every five minutes. However, it is recommended that the Save button be used frequently as well.

Some of the themes provide font options, including Malala. Called ‘Shape Shifter’, a codename for theme options that allow book administrators to select typefaces for Headers and Body text from a curated list of open fonts.

Unlike desktop publishing software with steep learning curves, Pressbooks allows you to customize a large number of print settings without having to do much learning.

Global options affect all outputs, including PDFs. The options help you determine whether to display part and chapter numbers, enable or disable a table of contents (TOC) with two levels, display the copyright license or eliminate it and add fonts to support languages that require special characters in addition to the default fonts.

Custom Styles enable you to modify the default formatting for any theme by adding CSS to the book’s stylesheet. If you are proficient in CSS, you can alter the appearance of your web, ebook (EPUB), and PDF (print and digital) documents.

With the Clear Formatting option, you can select the content and strip away its formatting. Additionally, this application allows you to paste text only, which prevents the import of unwanted formatting.

The primary accessibility recommendation for headings is to always begin with H1 and work down. Do not omit headings based on their appearance, as headings should always be used in sequential order.

The table of contents in Pressbooks displays chapter-level titles by default. You must select “Enable two-level table of contents (displays headings under chapter titles)” in the “Global Options” section in the theme options if you want to display subheadings for the chapters in the table of contents as well.

Use the “Collapse Section” option to create collapsed parts within each chapter of a webbook to make navigating lengthy chapters easier. When turned on, your webbook’s top-level headings (Heading 1 or <h1> components) could be collapsed and expanded into subsections.

Educational institutions, academic presses, modest publishers, and individual authors can utilize Pressbooks. It can be used in three ways:

• Individually create a book using the self-service Pressbooks instance. This is ideal for single-author works.
• Pressbooks can host and maintain the Pressbooks network. Pressbooks’ managed hosting, security updates, tech support, and training will save your IT and development team incalculable hours. This is ideal for academic institutions and publishers of all sizes.
• Those who choose the option of self-hosting and maintaining Pressbooks will need access to developers and system administrators who can host and maintain a network as well as troubleshoot technical issues.