What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is an authoring platform built on the popular WordPress publishing and blogging website. If you have used WordPress in the past, Pressbooks should feel familiar. Pressbooks allows you to create content once and publish it in many formats including as website, PDF document, EPUB (usable in most eReaders), and various editable files.

What to expect from this guide

This guide is designed to compliment the Pressbooks User Guide published by Pressbooks.com. It follows the steps an author might take to create or modify an open educational resource (OER) in Pressbooks. Each chapter points readers to the pertinent chapters in the Pressbooks User Guide, provides any additional information, and includes instructions specific to faculty and staff at the University of Manitoba.

Each section of this guide begins with a list of topics covered in its chapters. Key terms, specific to Pressbooks and its features, are set in bold and defined in the text body as well as summarized in the Glossary. This guide does not come with an index. Instead, use the search field located in the top-right of each page in the online version to locate a specific topic.

This guide is an ongoing resource, so it is updated as needed. Each chapter includes a “Last update” posted at the top of the page. Because this resource is edited frequently, ISBNs are not provided for this guide in accordance with the ISBNs’ User Manual.

Pressbooks User Guide

Pressbooks User Guide chapters are identified by the Pressbooks (PB) logo and a link to the material. (See example below.)

For more information, see Edit Content with the Visual and Text Editors in the Pressbooks User Guide.