InfoGuides: Low-Cost, No-Cost, and Open Educational Resources (OER): The Pressbooks Ecosystem

What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is a versatile, user-friendly publishing platform educators rely on to create, adapt, and share accessible, interactive, web-first books. Pressbooks uses the venerable Wordpress platform to build books in a similar manner to a blog.

All books from Pressbooks have a Creative Commons license, allowing them to be redistributed for free, and modified to suit your needs.

Pressbooks Directory
Pressbooks Directory provides an index of 5,164 books published across 150 Pressbooks networks.
Media Communication, Convergence and Literacy
A Pressbooks book created by Patrick and Enyonam Osei-Hwere of West Texas A&M
Introductory Business Statistics with Interactive Spreadsheets – 1st Canadian Edition
An interactive statistics textbook that uses embedded Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to enhance student knowledge.
Introduction to Psychology [Lumen/OpenStax]
A version of an OpenStax textbook adapted to include interactive exercises.

Plugins

H5P: H5P makes it easy to create interactive content by providing a range of content types for various needs.

H5P Types
H5P's webpage showing the various types of H5P content.
APA Exercises
A quick series of interactive exercises in an OER Information Literacy textbook currently under construction at Cornette Library.

Hypothesis: Hypothesis is an easy to use pedagogical tool that enables students and teachers to have conversations in the margins of digital texts. Using social annotation gives you new ways to foster student success by building community, critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of readings.

APA Style
This is a short chapter on how to use the APA style. Click on the circle with a strike through it on the upper right corner to reveal public annotations for this chapter.
Hypothesis
The Hypothesis website, where you can learn more about social annotation and install the browser plugin.

MathJax/MathML/AsciiMath/LaTeX: Pressbooks offers two different methods for rendering mathematical equations in your books: via a native MathJax integration and through the WP QuickLaTeX plugin. Many different types of mathematical markup languages are supported through these two plugins.

Finite Mathematics - Solving Systems Using Matricies
This page demonstrates mathematical equations encoded using MathJax

Download Formats

There are many download formats available including:

Print PDF: Print PDF files are the format you should select if you plan to make a printed, physical copy of your book. This file meets the requirements of printers and print-on-demand services.
Digital PDF: Digital PDF files are useful if you want to distribute your book as a digital file, but do not intend to print the file. Digital PDFs are optimized for accessibility, contain hyperlinks for easier navigation, and can be used online.
EPUB: EPUB files can be submitted to any popular ebook distributor and opened by most modern ebook readers. This is the file you’d use to submit your ebook to Kobo, Nook, iBooks, Amazon, and others.
Pressbooks XML: The Pressbooks XML format is a particularly useful format if you’d like to move all or part of your book from one Pressbooks network to another, or to combine parts of multiple books into a new book.
Common Cartridge with Weblinks: Pressbooks allows you to produce Common Cartridge exports with weblinks. Common Cartridge is an standard developed by IMS Global to define interoperable packages for use in Learning Management Systems [LMS]. The Common Cartridge with Web Links export produced by Pressbooks can be used to quickly import each chapter of a public book into a course in your LMS as an external link.