Produce Exports
Make a Book Cover
There are three basic types of book covers that matter to Pressbooks authors:
- The webbook and internal ebook cover (displayed on the book’s home page and included as part of your EPUB exports)
- The marketing cover for your ebook (often required or recommended to be uploaded as a separate file by ebook distribution stores)
- The cover for a print on demand PDF export (required to be uploaded as a separate file by most print on demand book publishers)
Pressbooks’ primary function is to generate interior book files for ebooks and print books. You do not have to use Pressbooks to create your book covers—you can source those separately—but you can use our book cover generator to produce external covers which can be used for both your ebook or PDF exports. When using the cover generator tool, files will be automatically sized to comply with complex industry specifications.
NOTE: Print-on-demand services require that interior and cover files are submitted separately, but ebook services typically do not. Pressbooks will include an internal book cover when producing EPUB exports, but does not include this internal cover when generating PDF exports.
Change Your Webbook Cover
The easiest of these exports to create and configure in Pressbooks is your webbook cover. This cover image is also included as the internal book cover for ebook (EPUB) exports. To change the default book cover for your book in Pressbooks:
- Design a cover image for your book that is at least 800px tall and which has an aspect ratio (width to height) between .66 and 1. We find that cover images that are 900 pixels wide and 1200 pixels tall (aspect ratio of .75) consistently look great in Pressbooks. You can generate this file using Pressbooks cover generator tool, hire a professional designer, or make one yourself with a free online design tool like Canva.
- Once you have a cover image you’d like to use for you webbook home page and EPUB exports, enter your book dashboard and select ‘Book Info’
- Scroll down to ‘Cover Image’. Click Choose File and locate your book cover file on your computer
- Click Choose to upload that file into the Pressbooks system and click ‘Save’ to complete the cover image change.
If your cover image does not meet the required specifications (minimum height of 800 pixels and width to height ratio between .66 and 1), you will see an error message informing you of what you need to change. Make the necessary changes and try to upload the file again.
If successful, your most recent cover image will be saved to your media library and will be used as the cover image for your webbook and included as the internal cover image in your EPUB exports. Very large images will be automatically downsized to a maximum height of 1500 pixels.
Create a Marketing Cover for your Ebook Exports
The ‘marketing’ cover is a standalone file that many ebook vendors or marketplaces will ask you to include when uploading your ebook for distribution or sale o