Pressbooks Guide for Educators: Introduction

Owned by Juliet Wilhelm (Unlicensed), created
Last updated: Dec 13, 2022

Summary

This guide offers an overview and introduction to Pressbooks for Boise State and non-Boise State educators. Resources are provided on using Pressbooks to create OER, curricular content, and interactive learning activities.

Introduction offers a brief introduction to Pressbooks and the different versions of Pressbooks available for content creation and publishing.

What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is a WordPress-based online platform for self-publishing books in multiple formats: e-books, webbooks, and print-ready PDFs. The software, which is open source, makes significant changes to the WordPress admin interface, web presentation, and export routines.

Pressbooks is a popular tool for open textbooks, making easy the process of creating, modifying, and publishing. Pressbooks offers accessible design, interactive assessment (through the H5P plugin), embedded multimedia, and web annotation (through Hypothes.is), which make it a good platform for the creation of OER and supplementary course materials.

With Pressbooks, faculty can find, adapt, create, and contribute to educational content that is customizable, accessible, interactive, and, if the author chooses, free. Pressbooks supports non-disposable, open, accessible, interactive, and customizable content and courseware.

Reasons to Use Pressbooks

  • Low-medium learning curve

  • Downloadable in multiple formats

  • Ideal for open textbooks, supplementary course materials, online learning activities, and more

  • Similar to WordPress

What version of Pressbooks should I use?

  • Public Install

    • The public installation of Pressbooks is free to use for private books. Use this if your are uncertain whether Pressbooks is right for your project, if your project is small, or if you lack the resources to maintain your own instance of Pressbooks. A public E-Book requires a one-time fee of $20 for 25MB.

  • Boise State Pressbooks

    • Students and faculty members at Boise State have access to Boise State’s Pressbooks environment. We highly encourage faculty working on open access journals or educational resources can seek a consultation with the Albertson’s Library for support with publishing and licensing best practices.

  • Open Source

    • For institutions, academic presses, small publishers, and individual authors with a larger volume of publications, it may make sense to host and maintain your own instance of Pressbooks.