2:57 p.m.
Dear Pressbooks User,
After much discussion and consideration, we have decided to retire the Open Textbooks
theme available in Pressbooks. While this change won't occur for several weeks, we do
ask that book administrators switch their open textbooks in pressbooks.bccampus.ca to one
of the other available themes in preparation for this change. By switching in advance, you
will have the opportunity to review how the new theme affects your book and fix/report any
issues that you find. If you do not switch in advance of the change , your books will be
switched automatically to the McLuhan theme when the Open Textbook theme is retired.
How to change your book's theme
To change your book's theme, click the Appearance tab in the Dashboard menu. Under
"Themes," you will be able to select the theme you would like to switch to. We
recommend switching to McLuhan, Clarke, or Jacobs . You will have to do this for each book
that you are the Administrator for. If you need more assistance, watch this: Select a
Theme video tutorial
What is a theme?
In Pressbooks, a theme is a set of styles that can be applied to the entirety of a book. A
theme will determine things like font type and size, textbox colours, appearance of
headings, and line spacing in all export formats. By default, when you create a new book
in Pressbooks, that book will use the Open Textbooks theme, but there are a number of
different themes to choose from.
What does this mean for my book(s)?
Changing the theme of your book will affect the style of your book (font, link colours,
text size, textbox colours, etc) and possibly t he number of pages in the PDF, but the
content and structure should remain as-is . Once you change the theme, the webbook will be
updated with the new styles. Your exports will only reflect the change after you export a
new copy of those files with the new theme applied.
If you do not want the new theme applied to your exported book files, do not re-export the
files for your book.
Context for this decision
BCcampus built the Open Textbooks plugin at the beginning of the open textbook project to
expand the Pressbooks authoring platform to include features that specifically support
textbook authoring, such as the key takeaways and exercise textboxes . Over the last few
years, as Pressbooks has been adopted by more and more institutions wanting to publish
open textbooks, those features have been incorporated as features directly supported by
Pressbooks. As such, the Open Textbook plugin (aka theme) currently acts more like a
collection of styles, rather than a plugin that enables textbook-publishing
functionalities that wouldn't exist otherwise. In addition, it requires a considerable
amount of maintenance to be compatible with new Pressbooks updates that are happening all
the time, which slows down our ability to keep our Pressbooks instance up to date.
Sincerely,
The BCcampus Open Education Team and IT Support