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Pressbooks

Book Oven, Inc.
Canada
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About

Launched: 2011
Record Updated: Apr 18, 2024
Publishing system

Pressbooks is the versatile, user-friendly publishing platform educators rely on to create, adapt, and share accessible, interactive, web-first books.

Pressbooks also offers a Directory of ~6,000 (and growing) openly licensed/available books from the Pressbooks ecosystem.

Mission

To support creative contributions to human knowledge and learning through a powerful open publishing system, providing institutions and people (educators, scholars, artists, makers, researchers) with a platform for building and sharing ideas.

Key Achievements

  • Pressbooks began mostly working with individual institutions, but increasingly is working with larger Statewide systems with a more strategic approach to open publishing and open pedagogy.
  • The Pressbooks.directory recently reached 5,500 openly licensed/available books from around the Pressbooks ecosystem
  • We have begun working with a number of partner institutions to improve Pressbooks' features as a teaching and learning tool rather than simply a publishing tool.

    • Technical Attributes

    Open Code Repository

    Implemented
    Website (Opens in new window)

    Maintenance Status

    Actively maintained

    Technical Documentation

    Implemented
    Website (Opens in new window)

    Open API

    Implemented
    Website (Opens in new window)

    Content Licensing

    Users choose from the full cohort of Creative Commons licenses to All Rights Reserved.

    Hosting Options & Service Providers

    Hosting Strategy

    Hosting through service provider only

    Service Providers

    What other tools and projects does your project interact with?

    Among others:

    • hypothesis
    • h5p
    • mathjax

    Community Engagement

    Community Engagement

    Implemented

    Contribution Guidelines or Fora

    Implemented

    Code License

    Implemented
    Website

    Organizational Commitment to Community Engagement

  • present (and often sponsor) as many OER events/conferences as we can afford
  • monthly open client / product meetings

    • Engagement with Values Frameworks

    We have demonstrated a deep commitment to the principles of open since our founding back in 2011, and we have surely signed a few charters/declarations over the years, but in the end we've just focused on doing the work of providing a platform for open creation, for more than a decade and we hope to continue.

    User Contribution Pathways

    • Contribute to code
    • Contribute to documentation
    • Contribute to education or training

    Additional Information

    Organizational History

    Pressbooks is developed by Book Oven, Inc., a Montréal-based company founded in 2011 by Hugh McGuire (who also founded the free public domain audio book platform LibriVox in 2005). Originally aimed at self-publishing authors, in 2017 Pressbooks shifted its focus to work with universities on academic and textbook publishing. (paraphrased reference.

    Organizational Structure

    Business or Ownership Model

    Commercial (for-profit)

    Full-time Staff

    20.0

    Funding

    Primary Funding Source

    Program service revenue

    Funding Needs

    Pressbooks funds itself almost exclusively through software as a service (SaaS) fees charged to client institutions. We do occasionally work with clients on grant based projects to deliver new feature sets or improvements that align with our priorities; in these cases the partner client usually receives the grant, and we act as a technology partner/provider. If you have an idea for extending Pressbooks and are interested in this kind of partnership please let us know!
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