Technology for Teaching & Learning
37 Pressbooks
Micah Jenkins
Pressbooks is an online book/document formatting system that gives you complete control over your course content. Pressbooks can help you produce professional, platform-agnostic course materials in multiple formats: all Pressbooks templates are optimized to look great in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. This includes Kindles, phones, and iPads for ebooks, as well as the printed page.
Other advantages of Pressbooks include:
- Affordable access for students
- Unlimited ability to edit, update and redistribute materials.
- Ability to collaborate with other authors and editors
- A variety of book formats
The Short Guide to Pressbooks
- Register for a Pressbooks account.
- Add book information. This includes important elements like your name, the title, and the copyright license, which can be assigned on the Book Info page.
- Add and Organize Text. Import your materials or add in your chapters, then structure the content on the Organize page.
- Choose your book’s theme. Themes are the design templates for your book, which you can select by going to Appearance > Themes.
- Distribute your book.
For in-depth instructions and video tutorials, visit the Pressbooks User Guide.
How to Use Pressbooks
Register for an Account
Register for an account. During the registration process, you will create a username and password. You will need to provide a ufl.edu email address with no subdomains (e.g. aa.ufl.edu). Pressbooks will send you an email to complete the registration and activate your account. Be sure to check your spam folder if you don’t receive the confirmation email.
You’ll also be prompted to create and register a book at the time of your account creation, or wait to create one later.
Adding Book Information
The Book Info page is where you edit and add important information about your book. This includes information such as:
- Title
- Author name
- Publication date
- Publisher
- Copyright license and notice
- Ebook cover image
This list is far from exhaustive. Some information is necessary to add or edit, as we use it to automatically build integral parts of your book. This includes the book’s title and author name. Most other elements you can choose whether or not you’d like to add.
Adding and Organizing Text
You can add and organize your text from the Organize page, available from the left sidebar menu of your book’s dashboard.
This will be how you access all of your chapters and content in order to revise or create your text. You can reorganize chapters and parts of your page to change the layout of the book as well. You’ll see the three main parts of your book on this page:
Front Matter: Content in this section may include your introduction, foreword, dedication, and more. For more information on front matter, go to the Pressbooks front matter guide.
Chapters: This is the main body of your book. The main body can be broken up into several distinct parts.
Back Matter: Content in this s