Pressbooks as an automated book production tool has has existed since 2011. The
Pressbooks as an automated book production tool has has existed since 2011. The software was built on top of WordPress, an open source and widely used content management system on the web. Pressbooks was intended to be an easily usable tool for anyone wanting to make books, and to enable new models of publishing to emerge. Its first user base was mostly self-published authors and some small presses, seeking to decrease design costs and automate the design and formatting process. Meanwhile, Pressbooks was available for free as an open source software, and academic institutions began to take notice. Post-secondary institutions were hosting instances of Pressbooks on their own servers and using the book production software to sustain their open textbook production.
In 2017, the Pressbooks team decisively pivoted their business model away from the self-publishing industry and toward higher education, launching the PressbooksEDU initiative. Increasingly, colleges, universities, and educational consortia were beginning to look for software that could help make their OER programs successful. With many institutions using open source instances of Pressbooks to facilitate their book production, and others actively seeking to purchase hosting services for book production, the path forward was becoming clear. The simple, WordPress-based automated production system that small and medium independent presses had shied away from was exactly what OER programs—in search of easy-to-use, cost effective production methods—needed. Rather than charging a one-time fee per book on one shared network, Pressbooks opted for a business model based on charging an annual fee to host an entire network per institution. The change enabled a more stable revenue flow for Pressbooks, and also allowed for the innovative, unconventional web-based publishing models that CEO and founder of Pressbooks Hugh McGuire sought to explore from the beginning.
A large turning point for the company was its partnership with learning technologies consortium eCampusOntario; though many large organizations with OER programs, like SUNY and BCcampus, were already using Pressbooks in an open source capacity, eCampusOntario was the first consortium to commit to a hosted network and major financial investment in Pressbooks. eCampusOntario purchased a Pressbooks network that had the potential to make OER creation possible in all public post-secondary institutions in the province of Ontario, and also commissioned the custom development of educational features for the software. In the months following, Pressbooks worked to change its marketing and business strategies in a large overhaul of the company’s approach to book production. Pressbooks.com would still offer single-serving books, but PressbooksEDU would differ; the business model would be built on hosting standalone book production networks for institutions on an annual or monthly subscription basis. With the changed direction came the onboarding of sev