 Logo as of August 2022 | |
| Developer(s) | Book Oven, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 2011 |
| Stable release | 5.20.1 / 27 April 2021 |
| Repository | https://github.com/pressbooks |
| Written in | PHP |
| Platform | WordPress |
| Type | content management system |
| License | GNU GPLv3 |
| Website | https://pressbooks.org/ |
Pressbooks is an open source content management system designed for creating books. It is based on WordPress, and can export content in many formats for ebooks, webbooks or print. [1]
Pressbooks is developed by Book Oven, Inc., a Montréal-based company founded in 2011 by Hugh McGuire (who also founded the audio book platform LibriVox). [1] [2] [3] Originally aimed at self-publishing authors, in 2017 Pressbooks shifted its focus to work with universities on academic and textbook publishing. [3]
The software is built on WordPress Multisite with modification of the admin and reader interfaces to reflect the intention of authoring books, a choice of themes for formating books, and to allow the export of books in print-ready PDF, mobi, ePub, and many other open formats. [4] [5] It is available as a hosted service for self-publishers (pressbooks.com), supported institutional hosting (PressbooksEdu), third party hosts, or self-hosting of the software available from pressbooks.org.
Pressbooks is often used to create open textbooks and other forms of open educational resource, for example at the following institutions:
Inter-library loan is a service that enables patrons of one library to borrow materials that are held by another library.
A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions, but also of learners. Schoolbooks are textbooks and other books used in schools. Today, many textbooks are published in both print and digital formats.
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly universally require peer review for research articles or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
The University Press of Florida (UPF) is the scholarly publishing arm of the State University System of Florida, representing Florida's twelve state universities. It is located in Gainesville near the University of Florida, one of the state's major research institutions. It is overseen by the Florida Board of Governors and publishes works from and about the state. Its predecessor was the University of Florida Press.
Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from some 400 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.
Zotero is free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF and ePUB files. Features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, integrated PDF, ePUB and HTML readers with annotation capabilities, and a note editor, as well as integration with the word processors Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It was originally created at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and, as of 2021, is developed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.
The following is a comparison of e-book formats used to create and publish e-books.
An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.
MERLOT is an online repository and international consortium of institutions of higher education, industry partners, professional organizations, and individuals. MERLOT partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing, and making available existing online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines for use by higher education faculty and students.
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com and in the iBooks Store. OpenStax's first textbook was College Physics, which was published online, in print, and in iBooks in 2012. OpenStax launched OpenStax Tutor Beta in June 2017, adaptive courseware based on cognitive science principles, machine learning, and OpenStax content. However, it was announced in October 2022 that Tutor was being discontinued.
Unizin is both a consortium of higher education institutions and a service provider. The Unizin consortium was founded in 2014 by Colorado State University, University of Florida, Indiana University, and University of Michigan. On July 22, 2014, Unizin named Amin Qazi its founding CEO. The Unizin service debuted its first offering, Canvas by Instructure, in late summer 2014. The goal of the Unizin service is to standardize digital learning by creating common standards that enable collaboration within the higher education community. The Unizin consortium offers a channel for collaborating on solutions to the many challenges being faced by educational institutions, as well as a means for those institutions to collectively govern resources and cost-effectively control infrastructure necessary to enable innovation at their universities. Unizin, Ltd. is a registered 501(c)(3).
Open Educational Practices in Australia refers to the development, implementation and use of Open educational resources (OER), open access, open learning design, open policies, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to open up education in Australia.
Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open education, open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies (OEP), open educational practices (OEP), and open scholarship that are established nationally and provincially across Canadian K-12 and higher education sectors, and where Canadian based inititatives extend to international collaborations.
eCampusOntario is a provincially-funded non-profit organization that leads a consortium of Ontario’s publicly-funded colleges, universities and Indigenous institutes to develop and test online learning tools to advance the use of education technology and digital learning environments.
The Boston Library Consortium (BLC) is a library consortium based in the Boston area with 26 member institutions across New England.
The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is an academic library consortium of Ontario's 21 university libraries located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Formed in 1967, OCUL member institutions work together to maximize the expertise and resources of their institutions through shared services and projects. OCUL works together in a number of key areas of importance for library services, including collective content purchasing, shared digital infrastructure, external partnerships, and professional development initiatives.
The Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) is a public-private partnership which was launched in 2014 by the World Intellectual Property Organization. The ABC was created with the intent of being "one possible initiative, amongst others, to implement the aims of the Marrakesh VIP Treaty at a practical level." ABC's goal is "to increase the number of books worldwide in accessible formats - such as braille, audio, e-text, and large print and to make them available to people who are blind, have low vision or are otherwise print disabled."