Welcome

Welcome to the home of the Pressbooks Open Source project, where you can learn about running Pressbooks on your own server. To learn more about using Pressbooks for your institution or as an individual, please visit https://pressbooks.com.

What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is a book content management system that allows users to publish books to the public web and produce exports in multiple formats, including EPUB, PDF, and various XML flavours. Pressbooks is built on top of WordPress Multisite but makes significant changes to the admin interface, web presentation layer and export routines of a standard WordPress installation. Pressbooks is free and open source software, released under the GPL v3.0 license.

How can I use Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is used by educational institutions, academic presses, small publishers, as well as individual authors. There are three ways to use it:

  1. Create an individual book on our self-service Pressbooks instance. This is ideal for individual authors.
  2. Let us host and maintain a Pressbooks network for you. Pressbooks plans include managed hosting, security updates, tech support and training, and will save your IT/development team countless hours. This is ideal for educational institutions and publishers of all sizes.
  3. Host and maintain Pressbooks yourself. Those who pursue this option will need to have access to developers and sysadmins capable of hosting and maintaining a network and troubleshooting technical issues. If you plan to self-host, see our user and developer guides.

How can I support Pressbooks?

While Pressbooks is free & open source software, maintaining this project takes time, effort, and money. As a result, we ask our open source users to contribute to the project's sustainability in various ways. Our favourite kinds of support are:

If you or your institution would like to help sustain Pressbooks financially, please consider hiring us to provide enterprise hosting and support or simply contact us to discuss other sponsorship arrangements.

No matter how you choose to use Pressbooks, we encourage you to get involved with the project!