What is it?
Pressbooks is a book publishing platform that faculty and students may use to produce a wide range of written, web and multimedia works. Pressbooks was developed in 2017 by a Montreal company, Book Oven, which is run by Hugh McGuire who also founded the no-cost audio book service LibriVox.
Built upon the WordPress plugin architecture, the Pressbooks plugins add a suite of capabilities to WordPress that allow the author and collaborators to create, edit and distribute their work in a wide variety of formats and end user permissions and copyright options. These formats may include, not only traditional e-books, but web books, even with embedded multimedia elements, as well as traditional web or print formatted pdf’s.
OSU Academic Technology, in collaboration with Unizin, maintains a PressbooksEDU installation for use by the OSU academic community. It provides you with a no cost, and no commitment, other than your time, document publishing solution. By using OSU’s PressbooksEDU platform you do not give up any intellectual property rights, and in fact may select a copyright and distribution scheme most applicable to your situation. The Academic Technology OSU Pressbooks is intended for academic teaching and research uses, while another instance of Pressbooks at OSU is hosted and maintained by Open Oregon State. Open Oregon State uses the platform to produce and distribute open educational resources – no-cost and low-cost texts – available to students. Contact Open Oregon State if you are interested in participating in the Open Educational Resources initiative.
View this brief video for an overview of Pressbooks.
Who is Using Pressbooks?
Pressbooks is publicly available in addition to being available to the educational community. A few other institutions of higher education using Pressbooks include the University of Hawaii, UC Berkeley, Indiana University, Illinois University, and Athabasca University among others. The Unizin Consortium, of which OSU is a member, offers Pressbooks to its member institutions and Pressbooks is integrable with other Unizin offerings such as Canvas and Engage.
What does it do?
Pressbooks simplifies aspects of book preparation and publishing through style themes and workflows that occur across the entire publication.
When you are satisfied with your work, a number of output formats may be selected for export and distribution, from your publication being available on the web, downloadable, or to be distributed as e-books.
Specific formats include: PDF (for both print and digital distribution), EPUB (for Nook, Apple Books, Kobo etc.), MOBI (for Kindle), HTMLBook, OpenDocument, XML (Pressbooks and WordPress), Common Cartridge 1.1 (Web or LTI Links) or several other formats.
When you are satisfied with your work, a number of output formats may be selected for export and distribution, from your publication being available on the web, downloadable, or to be distributed as e-books. Specific formats include: PDF (for both print and digital distribution), EPUB (for Nook, Apple Books, Kobo etc.), MOBI (for Kindle), HTMLBook, OpenDocument, XML (Pressbooks and WordPress), Common Cartridge 1.1 (Web or LTI Links) or several other formats.
Possible teaching and learning use cases include:
– Class/group produced anthology of student writing.
– Student or faculty annotated classic text.
– Collection of faculties, or subject matter exper writing for course use.
– Student produced collections of lab notes.
– How-to manual for labs, software, procedures, or projects.
What can it do for me?
OSU Pressbooks may bring collaborative authoring to your teaching. Students may work as teams or one large group to produce and publish a course book project
Pressbooks may be the tool that helps you write and publish your own book and research. You may upload Word, txt, and PDF files to create chapters of your book.
The direction, shape, and pace of your project belongs solely to you when using OSU Pressbooks. In addition to a world-class publishing platform, you also have support from Academic Technology in this pilot phase of our implementation.
Pressbooks is a powerful platform with many options, though it can be approached with minimal options for ease of use. Of course, it won’t write your books for you, but it will provide a foundation for turning a collection of written pieces into a whole work.
How do I use Pressbooks?
• Create an OSU Pressbooks account – http://pressbooks.oregonstate.edu.
• Login using the “Sign In” link at the top right of the top menu. Use your ONID ID, followed by your DUO confirmation. If this is your first time logging in your Pressbooks account will be created.
• Create your first Book. Choose the My Books Dashboard option, and next to the My Books page title choose “Add New”
• If you are working with others, have your collaborators create accounts then assign roles to them.
• Create your first Book. Choose the My Books Dashboard option, and next to the My Books page title choose “Add New”
• If you are working with others, have your collaborators create accounts then assign roles to them.
• Create, or Import, your content (Word) into your book. Check out this tutorial for an example.
* Check the generated table of contents and reorganize your chapters as needed in your book’s dashboard.
* Add media; graphics, videos, audios, or interactive elements.
* Choose the output (export) formats from the Book’s dashboard, select Export, then your desired export formats, then select “Export your Book.”
• Publish to the Pressbooks catalog or post your eBook on some other site or push your eBook to Amazon, ibooks, etc., using the Publish Dashboard option.
• Let us know what help you need: pressbooks@oregonstate.edu or 541.737.3811
What’s next?
Contact Mark and Jon at TAC for additional information, technical support, consultation, and advice.
Create an account and upload some work to give Pressbooks a try. We will contact you to find out how to best support you.
Given a successful pilot of OSU Pressbooks with a solid core of effective faculty and student users we hope to implement the platform campus-wide with potential integration into Canvas.
See examples of Pressbooks in action and support materials, including instructional videos, at
http://oregonstate.pressbooks.pub/help and https://learn.oregonstate.edu/pressbooks
Resources
Sources
PressbooksEDU Introduction Video – Visually Described Transcript
2019. Dorbolo & Dinsmore
