10 Making an Engineering Pressbook of Your Own
Why Pressbooks for Engineering?
I’ve been looking for good ways to get useful resources for students onto the web since the original of this page went up in the mid 1990’s. It still turns up first in a Google search for losses in pipes. In the mean time I’ve gone from raw html through various platforms and LMS content systems chasing ease of formatting and student accessibility. Pressbooks is my current preferred option. It has been adopted as a standard for open text books in multiple jurisdictions, yet it still has multiple flaws.
Still, I’m quite excited about a platform that makes it this easy to provide text, latex equations, YouTube video, links to PDFs and to GitHub source code for a Jupyter Notebook in a format that’s well organized for students. The best way to understand what’s possible is to start building something of your own!
Multimeters 101 is another eCampus Ontario Pressbook providing an example of some of the features.
Getting Access
There’s a wealth of general guidance available from the organizations hosting Pressbooks sites, and I will not try to duplicate it. My notes will be sparse, providing reminders for me and a head start for you on getting an engineering book up and running. This chapter will get you started. The next one will cover my problem solving notes and various things I have found weird along the way.
This book is hosted by eCampus Ontario at https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/ where you can get free access to create an open textbook for use in Ontario. They gave me this one to play with in the spring of 2019 because I’m a faculty member at an Ontario university and followed their links.
The same seems to be possible in British Columbia https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/. Their resources at https://opentextbc.ca/pressbooks/ provide really useful information for creating open textbooks specifically with their instance, and is widely applicable.
The Rebus Community https://www.rebus.community/ is an alternative for global collaboration in creating OER Pressbooks.
Before I was aware of these options I started with a book at https://pressbooks.com/, with materials students would need to know for one of our projects. https://apsc100tinyhouse.pressbooks.com/ Anybody can write books at the pressbooks.com site, but you will need to pay US$20 or more to make them publicly available on the web.
Configuration Checklist
This list will help with getting started. It includes my personal biases towards books that include equations and Preformatted
source code in an engineering setting.
- Create your book by selecting My Catalog/Create a New Book from the top left of the Pressbooks window.
- Fill out the Book Info (left sidebar), including a title, publication date and licensing information.
- Pick a theme (Appearance/Themes) for your book and set the theme options (Appearance/Theme Options)
- McLuhan is the default, but has a mismatch between the
preformatted
and regular text si