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
Hugh McGuire Asks: Why Can’t We Read Anymore? I wrote something last week that might be of interest to you, a piece about my efforts to wean myself from digital overload & start reading books again. It’s called: “Why can’t we read anymore? (Or, Or, can books save us from what digital does to our brains?)”
If you test your Pressbooks output of Kindle files on your iPad/iPhone, it will look not look very nice. But the files that people actually buy from Kindle on iOS devices will look fine. Here is why: Pressbooks uses Amazon’s Kindlegen software to create the MOBI export (which converts from the EPUB file generated by