9 Book Info
The Book Info page is where you enter all the metadata about your book. This includes information such as the book’s various contributors, the copyright license you’ve chosen, the ISBN associated with your book, and more. In this section, we’ll cover what’s included in:
Book Info
In Pressbooks, the Book Info page is where you put information about your book. In the book publishing industry, this is called “metadata”— or, data about the data. Metadata allows book stores and libraries categorize a book and make it easier for readers to find. It answers questions such as: What is the title? Who is the author? When was it published? And what is the book about?
Some pieces of metadata are required and will be filled in by default using the information you entered when you first registered your account and created a book. This information is used for the following purposes:
- To meet the metadata requirements of ebook sellers for your EPUB and MOBI files
- To automatically generate certain pages in your book, including the cover, title page, and copyright notice
- To build a book landing page on the web (read more)
However, it’s not necessary to fill out every single section of the Book Info page. You can choose to enter whatever information fits your needs for your project, though we do recommend adding as much information as you can when creating digital publications like webbooks, EPUBs, or MOBIs. Doing so will make it easier for interested readers to discover your book and quickly develop an accurate understanding of what it is about.
General Book Information
This section includes basic information about your book.
Title: Pressbooks will automatically fill in this section with the title that you first chose when you created the book. However, you can change the title at any time by editing this section. The title will be included in your automatically generated title page, half-title page, and webbook homepage. It may also be in the running content of your PDF files. The title is also required for the metadata that goes into your EPUB file. This section cannot be left blank.
Short Title: A shorter version of your title can be entered if your full book title is too long for the running content in your PDFs. This field is optional.
Subtitle: Like the title, this information will automatically populate the title page and webbook homepage if entered. The use of a subtitle is optional.
Author: The author name is used to populate the automatically generated title page and webbook landing page. It’s also included in the metadata file in your ebook. This field is required, and will default to your Pressbooks username if nothing is entered. For more information on how to add contributors, jump to the Contributors section.
Editor, Translator, Reviewer, Illustrator, and Contributor: These metadata fields can be filled in to properly credit the contributions of individuals who filled specific roles in the creation of the book. All contributor field