Improved Internal Linking Mechanism, Removed Suggested Videos, and more

What’s New on PressbooksEDU

This week’s release brings with it a number of improvements to the default behaviors and interface of Pressbooks.

Removed Suggested Videos from Embedded YouTube Videos

YouTube videos embedded in platforms like Pressbooks naturally roll over into suggested videos once the video ends. As a platform for educational texts, we recognized the need to alter this behavior. Now, YouTube videos should end without suggested videos and revert back to the opening screen of the video when they’ve been played out.

Reduced Spam for Your Support Team

We’ve noticed a lot of spam in our support inbox lately, and we bet you have too. To mitigate this recent increase in spam, we’re ramping up anti-spam security for Pressbooks Contact Forms.

We’re using the Honeypot Method. This involves adding an extra, hidden field to the Contact Form that users won’t be able to see but bots will fill out automatically. This automatically filters your spam out from the rest of your Contact Form submissions.

Improved Internal Links in Digital PDF Exports

Users can now link to other content within the same book using absolute links. Prior to this change, absolute links, when clicked, would direct readers to the webbook. Authors would need to make all internal links relative rather than absolute in order for the content to link properly.

Now, absolute links will automatically register as relative links when placed in your chapter, and will allow users to navigate within the digital PDF itself.

Other Great News

You may notice these other changes we’re releasing this week to improve your Pressbooks experience:

• • Improved link insertion interface. We’ve enabled users to search for anchors throughout the entire book instead of just a single chapter. Previously, the link insertion interface only let you search for anchors within the chapter you were currently editing.
  • Improved fallback for authorless clone books. Previously, if a clone book’s source book had no authors, the attribution on the clone book’s cover page would say “by ,” with a blank space where the author name(s) should have been. We’ve improved how this auto-populated content accommodates authorless books.
  • Easier book creation for first-time users. Logged-in Pressbooks users can now create books from the menu of their network homepage. Previously, this functionality was only available to users who already had books in their user catalog.

Have any questions about these changes? Contact support@pressbooks.com.