What is Pressbooks?
Pressbooks is a variation of WordPress that facilitates the publication of accessible, customizable, reusable, and iterative open textbooks. Suited to accessible learning in our digital age, it enables publishing in many formats, including as a website, PDF document, EPUB (usable in most eReaders), and various editable files.
Pressbooks: FAQ
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 will feel familiar. Pressbooks is online software that enables authors and publishers to design and format books in several formats, such as:
- PDF: for print or print-on-demand
- EPUB: for Apple iBooks, Nook, Kobo, Kindle and most other ebook platforms
- Webbook: private or public
What are the advantages of using Pressbooks?
Pressbooks is an open-source publishing platform used by independent authors, small and medium-sized publishers, and educational institutions worldwide. Advantages include:
- Templates (a.k.a. Pressbooks themes) designed for e-books are optimized to look great in a wide variety of formats, meet accessibility standards, and can be customized to some degree
- 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 licensing and attribution standards
- Pedagogues have the option to include interactive and multimodal content to encourage learning
- Daily backups
What can I expect from this user guide?
Our Guide to Pressbooks (published by Concordia University Library) provides help for various parts of the textbook production process on Pressbooks. It includes chapters across many aspects of adopting, customizing, or creating an Open Educational Resource (OER) in Pressbooks. The side navigation bar shows the range of topics covered. Additionally, the search field is located at the top-right of each page in the online version to locate specific terms that appear in the book.
This guide is a living resource, so we will update it as needed.
Where can I find more help with Pressbooks?
- Pressbooks YouTube channel
- Pressbooks Community Forum
- Pressbooks Knowledge Base (includes a FAQ, a section on book creation and more)
- Pressbooks Directory (a free, searchable catalogue that includes 5,645 open-access books published by 156 organizations and networks using Pressbooks)
If none of these Pressbooks resources contain an answer to your specific question, post in the Community Forum, where your questions are viewed and responded to by other Pressbooks users.
