Pressbooks is a centrally managed network of individual books hosted by eCampusOntario and available for free to educators, students and staff at Ontario colleges, universities, and indigenous institutes. This is Ontario's Pressbooks homebase – and each book you create will have a home page on this network.
If you don't already have an account, there are two pathways in to get one. Either way, start by:
Once you've created your account and have successfully logged in, you'll be presented with a page like the one you started with, but with "Admin" and "My Books" options.
Before creating or writing in Pressbooks, you may want to consider a few important features or elements about your book. Take some time to think about your book's landing page, also known as the "webbook". To be clear, whether the resource you're creating is an actual 'book' or not – this is the term used to describe the landing page. The "webbook" is the book's home page. Each book you create will have its own distinct URL. A book's home page looks a bit like the image below.
The book cover is on the right and, below it, a drop-down menu shows the different download formats. There's also basic descriptive information about the book, as well as a clickable table of contents that lets you browse the book. You can also include other metadata at the bottom of the page.
There should also be a basic description of the book.
The best way to learn about the Pressbooks platform is to simply start creating with it. In this next section, we'll walk through the process of creating a new book that you can use as your safe space for testing things out prior to publishing a more permanent resource.
There are three ways you can create a new book in Pressbooks:
This activity is optional.
Complete the steps below to create a Pressbook from scratch.
There are other ways to create new content for your book other than from scratch. You can clone any book in a Pressbooks network, provided it is licensed under an open license that allows adaptation. You can duplicate the book's content and settings by simply copying and pasting its URL, then assigning a new one.
This activity is optional.
Complete the steps below to clone a book in Pressbooks.
A cloned copy of the original resource will now be listed in your books (under "My Books"). You can now easily edit the Parts and Chapters to customize and contextualize it for your own teaching and learning purposes.
You can also add a source comparison. If you clone a book, it will always feature that handy little tag at the bottom of the page indicating the book's source and linking to it. This helps readers understand which version of the book they're looking at. You can even activate a side-by-side source comparison to show readers what has changed in your version.
If you've already created content elsewhere via another tool or platform, you can easily import it. You can import Word documents, EPUBs, XML or content from URLs. For example, if you have written content using Word, you can import this content and create a digital book that can be shared and distributed in different formats. You can also use the import function to extract specific chapters if you want to rework or just use part of an existing text.
Importing from one format to another never goes smoothly, so you'll need to do a bit of clean-up. You can prepare your Word document to facilitate this process:
This activity is optional.
Complete the steps below to import an existing resource into Pressbooks.
When you import content, a list of all "chapters" is displayed, allowing you to choose which chapters you want to keep and where in the book you want items to appear. Chapters can easily be reorganized later using the "Organize" menu, so don't worry too much about getting everything in the right place from the start. This is also useful if you're only adapting part of a book and want to exclude certain sections.