Pressbooks Guide

Welcome to BCcampus Open Education’s Pressbooks Guide. This support resource was written for open textbook authors who want to use this writing platform to create a new book, or instructors interested in customizing an existing open textbook. BCcampus Open Education began in 2012 as the B.C. Open Textbook Project with the goal of making postsecondary education in British Columbia more accessible by reducing students’ costs through the use of open textbooks and other OER. BCcampus supports the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia as they adapt and evolve their teaching and learning practices to enable powerful learning opportunities for the students of B.C.

BCcampus Open Education is funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills & Training, and the Hewlett Foundation. Open educational resources (OER) are defined as teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by the copyright holder, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them. We consider this publication—along with our guides, webinar slide decks, and other support materials—as a type of OER that trains faculty, staff, and students how to build, customize, and use open textbooks.

The BCcampus Writing Guidelines for Style and Tone and BCcampus Open Education Style Guide, along with the attached style sheet [Word file], were referenced during the copy editing and proofreading phases of this guide. To ensure that standard barriers are addressed for maximum access by as many readers as possible, this guide meets the criteria laid out in the Checklist for Accessibility—including an Accessibility Statement—and is flagged as “Accessible” in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection.

Pressbooks is an authoring platform built on the popular WordPress publishing and blogging website. If you have used WordPress in the past, Pressbooks should feel familiar. Pressbooks allows you to create content once and publish it in many formats including a website, PDF document, EPUB (usable in most eReaders), MOBI (for Kindle readers), and various editable files. This Pressbooks Guide does not replicate information provided by the Pressbooks Userguide published by Pressbooks.com.

Instead, in parts and chapters laid out to mimic the steps an author might take to create or modify an open textbook in Pressbooks, it redirects readers to pertinent chapters in the Pressbooks Userguide, supplements it with additional information, and includes instructions specific to post-secondary faculty and staff working in British Columbia and the Yukon.

Accessibility Statement

BCcampus Open Education believes that education must be available to everyone; this means supporting the creation of free, open, and accessible educational resources. We are actively committed to increasing the accessibility and usability of the textbooks we produce.

Other file formats available

In addition to the web version, this book is available in a number of file formats including PDF, EPUB (for eReaders), MOBI (for Kindles), and various editable files. Here is a link to where you can download this book in another file format. Look for the Download this book drop-down menu to select the file type you want.