Are you thinking of writing an open textbook, but wondering how to start?
This guide will cover the basics of using BCcampus’s Pressbooks installation for authoring and sharing open textbooks. The goal of this guide is to provide screenshots, visual elements, and simple step-by-step instructions on how to create and augment your textbook.
Pressbooks is one of the tools UBC supports to create and adapt open texts. Pressbooks is open source, providing online authoring and publishing services, and runs on WordPress, a popular publishing and blogging platform. Pressbooks enables multiple delivery formats for your open textbook: your users can access it via a website, PDF document, EPUB document (so your readers can use their e-reader), or MOBI (specifically for Kindle).
This guide is a part of UBC’s Open Textbook Publishing Guide (OTPG) which assists UBC faculty and staff who are engaging in open textbook publishing projects. The OTPG is arranged into phases of the publishing process from planning to creating content to collecting data about the impact of the publication. It provides sample project planning templates; workflows for text design and structure; communication and networking practices for your project; and the supports available to you at UBC for your project.
