Welcome

Welcome to the home of the Pressbooks Open Source project, where you can learn about contributing to Pressbooks, setting up a local instance of Pressbooks for development, or hosting an instance of Pressbooks on your own server.

What is Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is a book content management system that allows users to publish books to the public web and produce exports in multiple formats, including EPUB, PDF, and various XML flavours. Pressbooks is built on top of WordPress Multisite but makes significant changes to the admin interface, web presentation layer and export routines of a standard WordPress installation.

Pressbooks is free and open source software, released under the GPL v3.0 license. The source code for Pressbooks and all related plugins and themes are hosted on GitHub.

How can I use Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is used by educational institutions, academic presses, small publishers, as well as individual authors. There are three ways to use it:

  1. Create a book on our hosted Pressbooks Self-Publisher service. We offer monthly subscription plans for individuals or teams who want to publish a single book. Anyone with an email address can start a free trial. Learn more about Pressbooks Self-Publisher.
  2. Let us host and maintain a Pressbooks Enterprise Network for you. Enterprise Pressbooks networks include managed hosting, regular security updates, tech support, training, and premium features designed specifically for enterprise publishers. This option is particularly well-suited for educational institutions and independent presses. Learn more about Pressbooks Enterprise Networks.
  3. Host and maintain your own Pressbooks network. Those who pursue this option will need to be comfortable installing Pressbooks and its required dependencies on a web server, as well as performing regular software and security updates. If you plan to self-host, see our user and developer guides.

No matter how you choose to use Pressbooks, we encourage you to get involved with the project!

How can I support Pressbooks?

Pressbooks is free & open source software, but maintaining this project takes time, effort, and money. We ask open source users to contribute to the project's sustainability however they are able. Our favourite kinds of contributions are:

If you or your institution would like to help sustain Pressbooks financially, please consider hiring us to host your Pressbooks Enterprise Network or simply contact us to discuss other sponsorship arrangements.