Make your own books with Pressbooks

Pressbooks, created by Hugh McGuire and his Book Oven team in Montreal, is an elegantly implemented platform for authors who want to make their own print and ebooks, and for publishers who need to build an integrated production workflow. Built on the now ubiquitous Wordpress engine, Pressbooks is one of the easier production tools you will find. That does not mean it is simple or trivial to turn out well formatted files, but with a bit of self education and some attention to the history of book design and layout, it is very possible to use Pressbooks to build your book files, with output to epub, mobi (Kindle format), and most remarkably, print ready PDFs with all elements of your book properly formatted. Pressbooks handles illustrations, footnotes, and much more. And for those of us who are too busy to learn how to do it ourselves, for a very reasonable fee, Pressbooks will build your book for you.

At Booktrix, we produced the excellent business book, True South: Leadership Lessons from Polar Extremes, using Pressbooks; this is a book that includes a large number of photographs, maps, and charts, all challenging to layout and page design. There is excellent online support and a fine team of book builders who can assist. 

For authors, Pressbooks has a great advantage - the cost is very low and they will also handle distribution to the self publishing platforms for you, taking zero percent of your revenues. They make their money on book production only, a very fair model. An author who does not want to learn the inner workings of book design and layout might hire a designer at a reasonable rate who can then handle production on Pressbooks, making the cover art, and insuring that all the book elements are present and accounted for. 

For businesses that publish as part of their work - and there are literally hundreds of thousands who do - Pressbooks might be an ideal solution, providing your communications professionals with book-specific tools and expertise to make your content shine.

At a price of less than $100 US to produce a book, it’s a easy way to get started producing professional quality books in print and digital formats. As you can tell, I am a fan of this software. I am not alone. Here is a comprehensive review of Pressbooks by Bitlit.

I am always happy to advise clients who are interested in determining what is their best path for publishing success. Feel free to be in touch with me.