Way back in mid-March, we closed our office as a precautionary measure in response to COVID-19, and since then I have been planning (and planning and planning) to write about Pressbooks and the ways open digital technologies, open content, and open practices can be part of a resilience strategy in the face of upheavals like
Dear all, If you are anything like our small Pressbooks team, you’ve been shaken up COVID-19, professionally, and personally. Things are scary, the changes are fast and drastic. We don’t know how long this is going to last or what it will turn into. In our own little company, things got very real very quickly. We
We’re looking for a junior front-end web designer/developer for a 2 month contract (in Montreal) that could lead into a full-time job with for Pressbooks, an open source web-based book publishing platform. Ideally, you’ve worked with WordPress, know your way around CSS and SASS, and have a particular interest in books, reading, & writing. We
Here at Pressbooks HQ we’ve been doing a whole lot more development work for the Open Textbook world, in our opinion the most exciting space in the world of publishing. For the uninitiated, an Open Textbook is an openly licensed (i.e. free) book that supports the “5Rs,” defined by David Wiley as the rights to:
We are very very excited to announce that we’re working with eCampusOntario and Ryerson University to improve Pressbooks as an Open Textbook authoring tool, under the just-announced eCampusOntario project: “Open Publishing Infrastructure for Ontario Post-Secondary Educators, Learners.” Most of the development work we undertake under this grant will be released as open source improvements to
Big news at Pressbooks headquarters: Dac is back! Dac Chartrand worked in the early days of Pressbooks (taking over from the also-awesome Janina Szkut), and did a huge job of re-architecting the system back in 2011, in particular moving Pressbooks from a LaTeX based PDF output system (ouch!) to an all-HTML+CSS system, including PDF. Yay,
If you are using Pressbooks Custom CSS as your Theme (which allows you to edit the design of your book), you might have noticed that your PDF (and possibly your EPUB) fonts have changed. This is a result of a big change we made in how we generate our CSS files in the backend of
Up until recently, Pressbooks EPUB exports were EPUB2.0.1, the latest version of the EPUB2 specification. We recently released EPUB3, which you can find in the “Exotic Exports” list on the export page. In theory, you should see no change in the exports, but under the hood EPUB3 is built differently, and provides support for audio, video, and, in
We have always tried to support different languages for Pressbooks exports, and up until now we’ve had to implement pretty “hacky” solutions. The problem is that in order to support certain languages, especially in PDF export, we need to include fonts for that language. We had no real standard way to do this — so
This is the transcript of a presentation I did at the Open Textbook Summit in Vancouver, on May 29, 2015. How I got here: LibriVox In 2005, almost a decade ago, I started a project that transformed how I thought about books. That project, LibriVox, inspired by Wikipedia and the open source software movement, asked volunteers