Please, Ask Us for Help!
If you are an affiliate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and are having trouble using Pressbooks or other digital publishing resources, you can contact the University of Illinois Library Scholarly Communication and Publishing unit for help.
For more information, visit the Scholarly Communication and Publishing website or email us at scpub@library.illinois.edu .
Subject Guide
What is Pressbooks?
Pressbooks is a WordPress-based online platform for self-publishing books in multiple formats: e-books, webbooks, and print-ready PDFs. The software, which is open source, makes significant changes to the WordPress admin interface, web presentation, and export routines. Although popular with monographs, edited collections, open textbooks, its built-in interactive H5P plug-in also makes it a good choice for Open Educational Resources.
The University of Illinois Library currently provides support for Pressbooks through the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN) for more formal projects, involving an author agreement with the library and working on a publication timeline. Request a publishing consultation to begin the process.
Reasons to use Pressbooks
- Low-medium learning curve
- Downloadable in multiple formats
- Ideal for monographs, manuscripts, blog-to-book, and open textbooks
- Similar to WordPress
What Version Should I Use?
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Public Install of PressbooksThe public installation of Pressbooks is free to use for private books. Use this if your are uncertain whether Pressbooks is right for your project, if your project is small, or if you lack the resources to maintain your own instance of Pressbooks. A public E-Book requires a one-time fee of $20 for 25MB.
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Pressbooks through Scholarly Communication and PublishingFaculty members working on open access journals or educational resources can seek a consultation with the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing to request access to the Library's Pressbooks account.
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Open SourceFor institutions, academic presses, small publishers, and individual authors with a larger volume of publications, it may make sense to host and maintain your own instance of Pressbooks.
Licensing
Except where otherwise indicated, original content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license. You are free to share, adopt, or adapt the materials. We encourage broad adoption of these materials for teaching and other professional development purposes, and invite you to customize them for your own needs.
Resources for Using Pressbooks
Example Pressbooks
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Portuguese Open Textbook
An Open Textbook using interactive HTML5 elements. -
Claude Monet: The Water-Lilies and other writings on art
A translated biography of the memoir "Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas (The Water-Lilies)", published by IOPN. -
Peripheral Narratives and Knowledge Production in Soviet and Contemporary Central Asia, 1917–Present
An edited essay collection published by IOPN.