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Using Pressbooks for Digital Publishing

This is a short introductory guide to using the Pressbooks publishing platform.

About Pressbooks

The University Libraries currently provide support for Pressbooks through its Open Scholarship Books program. This service is available to members of the WashU community whose projects meet specific criteria. The Libraries offer consultative services for other projects.

Pressbooks is a WordPress-based online platform for self-publishing books in multiple formats including EPUB, XML, MOBI, web-books, and print-ready PDFs. The software, which is open source, makes significant changes to the WordPress admin interface, web presentation, and export routines. Popular with monographs, edited collections, and open textbooks, its built-in interactive H5P plug-in also makes it a good choice for Open Educational Resources.

This guide focuses on users working with the Libraries Pressbooks instance, but some information is relevant to any version of Pressbooks.

Publishing with the Libraries

For more information about the Open Scholarship Books program, including proposal criteria, visit the guide Digital Library Program Services: Publishing, Repositories, and Projects.

 

Pressbooks Installation Options

Members of the Washington University community can seek a consultation with Digital Library Program Services in the University Libraries to submit a proposal to publish on the Libraries' instance of Pressbooks.

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.

Attribution / Credit

Much of this libguide comes from Publishing in Pressooks: Introduction by the University Library at the University of Illinois.