Pressbooks Guide for Educators: Book Organization
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.
Book Organization covers how content is organized in a Pressbooks book, and offers some recommendations on best practices.
Attribution
Adapted from L & S Support Services. "Organization." in Pressbooks 101. CC-BY 4.0.
Organization
On the web version of Pressbooks, each "chapter" functions as a single scrollable webpage. When working with a lot of content per-chapter, it is important to consider how the organization of the book will work best for your content and readers using the book.
A publication created in Pressbooks is structured like a standard book with familiar types of sections and chapters:
Front Matter (Table of Contents, Acknowledgements, Introduction)
Main Body that contains Parts & Chapters
Back Matter (Bibliography, Index, etc.)
You can embed limited types of media throughout the chapters in your Pressbooks publication, or have a special section at the end for media objects. In the end, your Pressbooks publication will look like a type-set publication.
Pressbooks automatically creates a title page, copyright page, and table of contents.
One Page Organization
Pros | Cons |
Single-scrolling page | Can be overwhelming when there is too much content |
All chapter content is in one place | Can be too busy when text, media, and interactive content is combined |
All interactive exercises are embedded in a chapter | With textbooks, it is not as easy to get back to earlier content or review it |
To overcome the challenges of the single-scrolling page, you might use Anchors throughout the chapter. Anchors are links that take you to a specific place on the page. These could be placed at the top of a chapter to link to section headings.
Multi-Chapters as Pages
Pros | Cons |
Reads more like a traditional book | Adds a lot of "chapters," crowding the table of contents and navigation |
Content is broken up into pieces, so readers can pick and choose what they want to read | People may skip important content |
Items can stand alone (interactive exercises, media, other content) | Needs more thought to structuring up-front |
The multi-chapter method of organization can be made more manageable by using Parts to contain the chapters.