After you have gathered your source material in Task 1, you will upload the chapters to PressBooks. Log in to your PressBooks account at PressBooks.com.

When you log in to PressBooks, you will be taken to the Dashboard of your book. It will look like this:

We won't be going over all the features of PressBooks in this workshop. Along the left side you have an administration navigation bar. You will be using this as the primary navigation around this administration area of your book. You'll be using;

  • Text area to edit the chapters of your book
  • Book Info to add in a title, author and copyright (Creative Commons) information
  • Media to upload your images (coming in a later task)
  • Export where we will create the ePub and PDF versions of your book
  • Utilities where you will find the Import feature we need to use.

Viewing your Book

There are 2 views of your book. You are seeing the administrative view of your book where you will add content to your book. There is also the public view of your book, which is the website that is created when you change the information in the administrative view.

To open the public book view, hover over the Book Title in the top navigation, A dropdown will open with a Visit Book link.

This link will take you to your book view.

When working on a book, I usually have 2 browser tabs open, one with the administrative dashboard for the book, the second with the actual public "book" view. When I make a change on the administration side, I can quickly click over to the book side to see what has changed on the book site.

Remove the existing content

By default, PressBooks comes with a few "seed" chapters as prompts for new authors to write a book. We're going to delete that information. In the left hand navigation, Click Text. You'll be taken to a page that looks like this:

PressBooks have 3 content catagories to help you organize your book

  • Front Matter holds content that you might find at the beginning of a book, like a preface or forward.
  • Main Body is where you would put the Chapters of your book
  • Back Matter is where you would find content that normally appears at the back of a book, like a glossary, appendix or index.

We are going to bring in new content, so for now delete the default Introduction, Chapter 1 and Appendix by clicking on the Delete link to the right. Once the existing content is gone, import the new content.

Import your ePubs

Go to Utlilities > Import and upload the 2 epub documents to PressBooks using the ePub import feature. Import the oer-introduction-10.epub file.

Here this start to get a bit tricky as you are now replying on having a well documented ePub format to help guide you. If the ePub document is well formatted, then you will have names of files here that make sense. In our case, the choices are not very obvious as to what parts of the ePub document we should import. So, for now, choose Select all and import all the content into your book by pressing Start.

Once the import is completed, you will be taken to the Text area of the PressBooks interface and be presented with a page that looks like this

Once that is done, we'll import the second ePub file. Got to Utilities > Import and repeat the process. Once you import the second epub document, you should have a list of content that looks like this:

Don't worry if you have duplicates right now. We'll fix that later. when we cleanup our content.

Last modified: Sunday, 16 February 2014, 8:02 AM