8 Create, Clone, or Adapt Your Own Pressbook
Perhaps you located several open texts that would be useful for your course, each dealing with a different or concept. In many cases, you can take the pieces you like the most and adapt them into your own customized textbook for your course!
Pressbooks Open Repository
Pressbooks is an Open textbook publishing platform. The University of Idaho has an instance in-development, which is currently overseen by the Open Education Librarian and the Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives. This repository is still under development but is paid for by the state and is intended as a space to hold Open texts created at the University of Idaho. The University of Idaho instance can be found here.
For an example of what other institutions in the state are doing check out:
Faculty can use our UI Pressbooks platform to easily remix any existing Open text created on the Pressbooks platform and contact the Library for support developing, remixing, or using content in Pressbooks. [1]
Why Pressbooks?[2]
When you compose in Pressbooks, you are creating a web version of your book or OER project. Pressbooks calls this web version of your book a webbook. Your students can access this webbook online and also download it for reading offline. Additionally, the webbook can easily be exported as a PDF for print or print on demand or as an EPUB for most e-readers.
You can add to, rearrange, edit, revise, and update your Pressbooks webbook at any time. The visual editor and the text editor (which enables you to view and edit HTML) will be familiar to you if you’ve previously worked in WordPress and is easy to learn if you don’t have that previous experience.
You can clone an entire book from another Pressbooks network for reuse, revision, and/or remixing for your own class. You can import chapters from other sources, including material you have created yourself, into your book. You can easily add images and other media to your book. And you can work with other authors, including your students, on a book—in fact, more than one person can work on the same book at the same time as long as you are working on different chapters.
With Pressbooks, you can incorporate different types of media into your webbook. You can upload images to the media library and display them. You can add embedded content—content that is hosted outside of your webbook but that your readers can view and interact with within the book. Everything your students need is in one place.
Additionally, you can use H5P, an open-source plugin, to add interactive content to your book, including quizzes and other learning activities. You can create these activities yourself or import H5P activities from elsewhere into your project.
Pressbooks includes a native integration with MathJax, a JavaScript display engine that renders mathematical equations and other special characters written in LaTeX and other markup languages. Use shortcode delimiters to mark the boundaries of LaTeX expressions, and MathJax takes care of the rest.
The Library is currently working on and in-depth how-to guide to Pressbooks, but if you are eager to get started now CUNY has a great guide to get you started!
- Seiferle-Valencia, Marco. Henrich, Kristin. and Ropski, Beth (2023). University of Idaho Institution Plan for Instructional Material Access and Affordability. ↵
- some content on this page comes from CUNY Pressbooks Guide by Andrew McKinney; Rachael Nevins; and Elizabeth Arestyl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted ↵
