Pressbooks: An Open Authoring Platform
Pressbooks is an online publishing platform that is built on the popular WordPress publishing and blogging platform. If you have used WordPress in the past, Pressbooks should feel familiar to you.
Pressbooks allows you to create content once and publish it in many different formats including as a website, PDF documents (print and digital), and EPUB document (usable in most e-reading applications and devices). It also allows you to include multimedia and interactive content in the resource, like H5P activities and embedded video and audio.
In addition, Pressbooks can be used to customize an existing open textbook during the adaptation process.
How to Access Pressbooks
Pressbooks for B.C. and Yukon post-secondary faculty and staff
BCcampus hosts a self-serve instance of Pressbooks available for free to faculty and staff who work at post-secondary institutions in British Columbia and the Yukon. We call it the British Columbia/Yukon Open Authoring Platform, and it is designed to support the creation, adaptation, and sharing of open educational resources (OER). Anyone with a B.C./Yukon post-secondary institutional email address can create an account for free.
Note that some B.C. institutions have their own Pressbooks instance for their faculty and staff (see the next section for more information).
Pressbooks for post-secondary institutions
A number of post-secondary institutions around the world make Pressbooks available for their faculty and staff to create OER. Here are the Pressbooks instances that BCcampus is aware of (although there are likely more): List of Pressbooks Instances
Pressbooks if you don’t have access to an institutional Pressbooks instance
- Option 1: The Rebus Community provides Pressbooks access to its members who want to produce an open textbook that will be released with an open-copyright licence (CC BY). Joining the Rebus Community is simple and free, and just requires that you create an account on their website. Once that has been done, to request access to a Pressbooks account, fill out the Rebus Community Press – Request for Access form.
- Option 2: For everyone else, Pressbooks is available as a monthly or yearly subscription. You can learn more about the different subscription options here: Pressbooks Plans and Pricing.