Welcome to CUNY Pressbooks.^[1] Pressbooks is an authoring platform built on the popular WordPress publishing and blogging website. If you have used WordPress in the past, Pressbooks should feel familiar. Though similar to platforms like CUNY Manifold and CUNY Academic Commons, CUNY Pressbooks allows you to create content once and publish it in many formats including a website, PDF document, EPUB (usable in most e-readers), and various editable files. CUNY Pressbooks also allows you to increase the discoverability of your published works by adding it to the Pressbooks Directory.

The CUNY Pressbooks Guide does not replicate information provided by the Pressbooks User Guide by Pressbooks. Instead, it gives an overview of the steps an author might take to create or modify an open textbook in Pressbooks. As needed, this guide redirects readers to pertinent chapters in the Pressbooks User Guide, supplements it with additional information, and includes instructions specific to post-secondary faculty and staff working in one of the two- or four-year colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY), as well as its comprehensive and graduate colleges.

Guide Layout

Each section of this guide begins with a list of topics covered in its chapters. Key terms, including terms specific to Pressbooks and its features, are set in bold, defined in the text, and also listed in the Glossary. This guide does not come with an index. Instead, use the search field located at the top right of each page in the online version to locate a specific topic. The URLs for all external links are provided by chapter for print users in a list in the back matter.

Pressbooks User Guide chapters and other links to Pressbooks resources are highlighted with a text box containing the Pressbooks (PB) logo and a link to the material, as in the example below.

For an introduction to Pressbooks from Pressbooks, see Introduction to Pressbooks in the Pressbooks User Guide.

When appropriate, references to relevant chapters within the CUNY Pressbooks Guide are given in a shaded text box, as in the example below.

Similarly, links to useful information in other CUNY Open Education guides and toolkits are also given in a shaded text box, as in the example below.

Finally, links to useful information outside of Pressbooks or CUNY are also given in a text box with no shading, as in the example below.

Updates and Development

The Pressbooks development community is very active and attentive to the needs of its users, and it strives to maintain and improve the platform for optimal functionality. Information about updates and changes is posted to the Pressbooks Community website and is presented at a monthly webinar at 2–3pm ET on the last Thursday of each month.