Make Your Book
Clone a Book
Pressbooks enables you to easily “clone” or copy any public, openly licensed book from one Pressbooks network to another. When you clone a book to your own network, you create a copy of the original book. You can then revise, remix, and redistribute your copy however you like without affecting the original book.
Book cloning enables a wide range of open pedagogical practices for both individuals and institutions. For example, cloning empowers students to collaborate on and improve ‘living resources’ that have been sustained over several iterations of a course, allows teachers to duplicate and immediately begin personalizing books specifically for their students’ needs, enables course chairs or program leads to quickly update shared course material (like syllabi) each semester without altering or destroying previous versions, and lets universities freely share public teaching and research materials they have developed for quick adoption and adaptation by others.
Clone a Book
You can clone any Pressbooks book that has been made public on the web and is in the public domain or has been published with a Creative Commons license that permits the free distribution of derivatives. Private books or books published as all rights reserved or “No Derivatives” licenses cannot be cloned.
To clone a book:
- Click the ‘Adapt a book‘ button in the main panel of your user dashboard
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Click the button ‘+ Clone Book‘ in the top menu from anywhere in Pressbooks to get to the Clone a Book interface. - Enter the Source Book URL of the book you’d like to clone
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Choose a book from the Pressbooks directory by entering a query in the ‘Search the Pressbooks Directory‘ field and clicking the ‘Select this book‘ button. - Enter the New Book URL. This will be the web address for the book you’re about to create. It cannot be changed later, so choose carefully.
- Click Clone This Book
- Watch the progress of the cloning operation. When the cloning process completes, click the new book’s title in the success message to access the new book’s admin dashboard.
Understand Cloning Error Messages
If you attempt to clone a book which cannot be cloned, Pressbooks will display an error message which provides more information about why the cloning operation failed before beginning the cloning routine.
In some rare cases, an in progress cloning operation may display an ‘EventStream Connection Error’ message before the progress bar reaches 100%. This occurs most often when you are cloning very large books or attempting to clone from a self-hosted network with an overwhelmed server. Instead of starting a new cloning operation for this book, we recommend waiting several minutes and then checking your ‘My Books’ listing in the top menu bar to see if your cloned book appears here. If the cloned book never appears, please contact your network manager.
What Content is Cloned
What is included when you clone a book:
- All the chapters, front matter, and back m