Pressbooks sustainability question

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Amy Hofer

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Apr 5, 2022, 2:05:36 PM4/5/22
to Open Textbook Network, CCCOER Advisory, SPARC Libraries & OER Forum
Hi all, this message is cross posted. 

Is anyone using Pressbooks in a way that feels sustainable to you? 

If so, I'd love to hear about what you're doing, how you define sustainability, and anything else you'd like to share :)

Thanks! 
Amy  

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Amy Hofer (she/her)
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cbeals

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Apr 6, 2022, 9:28:50 AM4/6/22
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Hi all, 

I am a little worried about if there will be future costs concerning Pressbooks. Also having a downloadable copy of things is very important to me, so I made sure to link to a PDF version of the textbook for my Pressbooks. But I do like how I can update my Pressbooks version of my textbook rather easily. I think it's always important to have a "hard" copy available for download and saving, as well as printing. 

Amy Hofer

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Apr 11, 2022, 2:17:31 PM4/11/22
to Adrian Stagg, Open Textbook Network, CCCOER Advisory, SPARC Libraries & OER Forum
Hi Adrian and all (this message is cross posted), 

I'm sorry for asking a vague question! I've gotten a lot of off-list requests for clarification. Thanks for bearing with me :/

Kathy Essmiller helpfully pointed to David Wiley's definition of sustainability (my favorite too!): “Sustainability will be defined as an open educational resource project’s ongoing ability to meet its goals.”

A better way to ask my question would be, what are your goals for your Pressbooks and do you have a structure in place to be able to meet your goals in an ongoing way?

A bit of our context is that we have a catalog of Pressbooks that we're generally hands-off with. We've considered doing an audit to assess which ones to bring up to a TBD standard of quality. We're also creating 13 new books through an ambitious externally funded grant project and want to be proactive about sustainable support for those (so in Wiley's terms, setting attainable goals for them). 

I've gotten some excellent ideas off-list which I'll share in a roundup at the end of the week. 

Thank you!
Amy

On Sun, Apr 10, 2022 at 4:49 PM Adrian Stagg <Adrian...@usq.edu.au> wrote:

Hi Amy,

 

This is a good question.  By ‘sustainable’ do you mean the way in which the platform is implemented, how staff interact with, the in-house support at an institution, the continued funding for the Pressbooks licence, or other considerations?  I suppose under how we’d define sustainability, one would set the parameters (and that may answer my first question)?  I just wanted to make sure I understood the request properly.

 

Thanks for your time,

Adrian

 

Adrian Stagg

Manager (Open Educational Practice)

Content Team | Library Services | Academic Division

University of Southern Queensland | Toowoomba, Queensland | 4350 | Australia

Confirmed PhD Candidate (UTas)

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Amy Hofer

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Apr 15, 2022, 7:26:31 PM4/15/22
to Adrian Stagg, Open Textbook Network, CCCOER Advisory, SPARC Libraries & OER Forum
Hi all, 

I got a few replies about why Pressbooks itself is sustainable for your program (for example as compared to Manifold, OERCommons, or other platforms). Here's what Kathy Essmiller said:

 Lots of accessibility features are baked in (works with screen readers, contrast, etc). We can break the features, but the default is accessible.

·         The work can be exported in a variety of file types across multiple platforms, which provides students a choice regarding the modality through which they would like to interact with the resources, a need which is a consistent finding in edtech research.

·         Built on WordPress, so feels familiar to our faculty/instructors/students already interacting with online materials. And for those who are not (creators/authors who work outside of Pressbooks and send me their stuff) the import process is pretty smooth, so if I do end up building it myself it isn’t a heavy lift.

·         We control whether/to what extent data is gathered (on the student level, etc.)

·         So, so, so easy to clone works from other Pressbooks accounts which have been licensed to permit that.

·         CanNOT clone works from other Pressbooks accounts if they have NOT been licensed to permit that. I love that.

·         Pressbooks Directory has international reach, so faculty whose work is set to be discoverable in the Directory are able to speak to the international impact of their scholarship and research.

·         The people there are just so doggone nice.


*****

Scott Robison gave me permisson to stop worrying about being hands-off with our languishing catalog of Pressbooks so much - thanks Scott! Here's what he says:

I guess for me the "brilliant" thing about open textbooks, and the Pressbooks platform especially, is that the "books" are perpetually in a dynamic state. They will become dated but they always _could_ be updated at some point. But is it the worst thing if they aren't? Traditional publisher textbooks (and most non-fiction hardcopy books for that matter) quickly become dated but they aren't necessarily pulled from the shelves (publishers just charge for new editions). They are a record of that point in time. Some might argue they should be preserved in their out-of-date state . 

I don't know if this is relevant to what you're thinking, but I would be less concerned about the long-term sustainability of the "quality" of open textbooks and more about the short-term access to open resources for students. Or related, in what ways can funding for the creation of "new" books draw on existing open resources / projects in some way that not only builds on existing work but adds to the "sustainability" of those works?

*****

Thanks for thinking this through with me, everyone!

Amy

Ed Beck

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Apr 29, 2022, 10:11:16 AM4/29/22
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I think one of the great things about the Pressbooks team and the Pressbooks community is that they themselves are worried about the sustainability of the works they produce.

Any website or web platform is eventually going to break without constant fixes, improvements, and adjustments to the way the future internet will work. Things change over time. There were people that spent thousands of hours creating flash interactives and now flash has completely disappeared from the internet. Someday PHP and WordPress as we know it may disappear from the internet too. I don't mean for that to sound doom and gloom, but I think it's just honest. WordPress has seen remarkable longevity as an internet tool, and the fact that so many sites and companies have a vested interest in keeping WordPress up to date and stable gives me hope. 

But we have seen small changes in Pressbooks over time due to software, approaches or other companies changing how dependencies work. BC Campus used to have a suite of plugins that they contributed towards Pressbooks, but have stopped. mPDF, the Open Textbook theme, those are gone, and at least on my network, we had to adjust and switch those books to another theme. When Amazon changed support for their Kindle Generation tool that Pressbooks used on the backend to create MOBIs, the Pressbooks team made the decision to remove that export capability from tool. Our networks and Pressbooks team had to make adjustments and adapt.

A looming future change that Pressbooks will eventually have to deal with is the Gutenberg Block editor. Released in 2018, I think it's time to stop calling it "new." Its the direction that WordPress Core sees for the creation of websites. Pressbooks still relies on the legacy tiny mce editor, which kind of looks like a word processor. Any change towards Gutenberg might effect every authoring action in the entire system including imports, the way books are written, custom blocks may replace shortcodes, and exports and themes may need to be rewritten to the new way that the HTML is presented coming from Gutenberg. Again, not doom and gloom, but I just want to point out that Pressbooks needs to be able to adapt going forward, which means they need to employ a team of developers, which means those developers will need to be paid. I see Pressbooks creating more and more premium features that they are only making available to their priority hosted clients. As an open source user, sometimes I get a little FOMO, when I see the newly released analytics report that I don't have access to, or the improved LTI and reporting structures for H5P, but at the same time I applaud those efforts, because by being able to sell premium features to clients that are contributing towards the long term stability of the platform. I feel more confident that my open source version will be supported and maintained in the future because they have those paid clients. That they have a robust business is part of the sustainability of the platform.

I'm also just prepared for a day when the Open Community moves away from Pressbooks as its go to solution for publishing books (not today!). When that eventually does happen, I know I will have PDFs, EPUBs, and HTML archives of the work we did there, and those can be stored longterm in library databases and institutional repositories, so that even if the web tool is not around some day, we won't lose the thousands of hours of efforts. The exports into alternative formats for preservation represent to me the sustainability of the content.

I also feel good when I see others think about long term sustainability like this conversation. 

Recently an open source librarian that goes by the handle SevenSidedSquare engaged the Pressbooks team in a conversation about how to automate the storage of PDFs, EPUBs on the internet archive and open library. Being able to automate important processes can be a form of stability, so that the open community doesn't need to step up and do heroic measures to save content as a large resource disappears. We have seen it happen in the past. It's just a feature request, and we don't know if it will ever be implemented, but the Pressbooks Team careful consideration of it let's me know we are working with the right people. Aren't they awesome?

Here's SevenSidedSquares suggestion on GitHub: https://github.com/pressbooks/pressbooks/issues/2689

So (1) sustainability of platform, (2) sustainability of content, (3) sustainability of effort. I feel good on all three accounts when I work with Pressbooks.

Ed

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Ed Beck
Instructional Designer
Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center
SUNY Oneonta 

Karen Cangialosi

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Apr 29, 2022, 10:40:18 AM4/29/22
to Ed Beck, CCCOER Community Email

Hey everyone,

 

The OEN is launching a new pilot called Manifold for publishing OER.  I just learned about it so forgive me if you are all already familiar with it or if someone has already posted about it.  

 

https://open.umn.edu/blog/open-education-network-launches-manifold-pilot

 

Demo project:  https://demo.manifoldapp.org/projects/google-document-sample

 

I don’t know anything more about it or whether Manifold would be more or less sustainable than pressbooks, but its nice to have options.

 

Karen

 

 

 

Karen R. Cangialosi, PhD 

Program Director, Regional Leaders of Open Education Network

(RLOE)| OEGlobal|CCCOER 

Director, Open Education/Open Science, RIOS 

Professor Em, Biology, Keene State College 

kcan...@oeglobal.org 

https://karencang.net  

@karencang  

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Amy Hofer

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Jul 27, 2022, 1:55:57 PM7/27/22
to Justina Brown, Adrian Stagg, Open Textbook Network, CCCOER Advisory, SPARC Libraries & OER Forum
Hi Justina, 

Yeesh, I'm sorry to hear about this! 

I believe that BC Campus hosts their own PB instance. 

I just attended an OEN Summit session about the new textbook planning, authoring, and hosting platform that the OEN is developing with Coko. It looks really exciting and I think it's near-ready for pilots. Beyond the pilot phase I'm not sure what the pricing will be and how it will stack up against PB. 

Thanks, 
Amy  

On Fri, Jul 22, 2022 at 9:26 AM Justina Brown <jbr...@wwu.edu> wrote:
Hello, all,

At my university, we do not have an enterprise license for Pressbooks, but we did purchase about 20 "Individual Faculty" licenses a few years ago. These were advertised at the time as perpetual; that is, $99 for life. Well, apparently that life is ending on 9/29/22. Our faculty are faced with three choices: 1) opt in to the new platform for $500/year, 2) move their e-book to a different platform, or 3) let it be deleted on 9/29/22. 

The new fee is not sustainable for us! What other platforms can you recommend? Does anyone host their own open source Pressbooks? Has anyone put their epub onto another hosting service such as reclaimhosting.com? 

Much appreciated,
Justina


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Justina Brown, M.Ed., she | her
Sr. Instructional Designer
Center for Instructional Innovation
Teaching, Learning, and Technology
Academic Technology & User Services (ATUS)
Western Washington University
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Wakim, Suzanne

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Jul 27, 2022, 2:01:56 PM7/27/22
to Amy Hofer, Justina Brown, Adrian Stagg, Open Textbook Network, CCCOER Advisory, SPARC Libraries & OER Forum

Hello.

 

We encourage faculty to use LibreTexts.  It’s free (and will remain so).  It also has a lot of additional functionality that makes it pretty awesome.  They can upload the book directly from PB for you (all you need to do is fill out a request OER integration form).

 

 

Let me know if you have any questions or if there’s anything I can do to help.

 

Suzanne Wakim

 

ASCCC OERI Project Facilitator

Creative Commons Certificate Facilitator; @ONE Course Facilitator; RLOE Collaborator

Butte College: OER, DE, SLO Coordinator; Biology Faculty

Schedule a meeting with me using Calendly

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Jennifer Rogers

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Jul 27, 2022, 7:21:24 PM7/27/22
to Wakim, Suzanne, Amy Hofer, Justina Brown, Adrian Stagg, Open Textbook Network, CCCOER Advisory, SPARC Libraries & OER Forum
Hi Everyone,

I’d like to second Suzanne’s comment re LibreTexts. Not only is our platform free, and will always be, but so is our remixing technology, LMS integrations, accessibility features, Beeline Reader technology, and much, much more. We do have a consortium for those interested in additional features and added professional development, but the core functionality of the LibreTexts project-our publishing platform and repository of over 500,000 pages of OER and public domain content-remains free in perpetuity for anyone to access. 

Happy to answer any questions anyone has!

Jennifer Rogers 
LibreTexts Outreach Coordinator 
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Ed Beck

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Jul 30, 2022, 11:26:10 PM7/30/22
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Justina said:

  • The new fee is not sustainable for us! What other platforms can you recommend? Does anyone host their own open source Pressbooks? Has anyone put their epub onto another hosting service such as reclaimhosting.com? 
@Justina, Since Pressbooks is an open source application, you can download and install Pressbooks on your own server, or you can contract with someone else to run a server for you. As part of our "SUNY Create" Domain of One's Own initiative, we run a few Pressbooks servers on Reclaim Hosting, the largest being https://pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud/. The Reclaim Hosting crew are genuinely a pleasure to work with if you decide to run a Pressbooks server with them. 

This thread started from Amy Hofer's question about sustainability, and if anyone considered their use of Pressbooks sustainable in some way. 

Many alternative platforms have been brought up through the discussion, including Manifold, LibreText, and other up-and-coming Open Source Solutions. I think what is really important here, beyond a lot of earnest people offering assurances that their platform is free and always will be, that when we talk about Open Platforms is that we can spin up our own instance and own our own data. I think anyone thinking about long-term sustainability should be wary of any organization that says they can host unlimited amounts of data, in perpetuity, for free. These systems that we are using are complex, need tending to by professional developers, and upgrades can start to get difficult as these systems get larger. 

So whatever platforms that we choose for publishing, we should always be thinking about questions like, 
  1. Could my institution run a server similar to this if it is mission critical to my program? 
    • If you consider something mission-critical, but have to rely on another organization to provide hosting for free, that's a major red flag for me. Again I think Pressbooks does a really good job at doing this, because I know that I can run a Pressbooks server on my own.
  2. Can the data and content be exported into different formats that are useful to me? 
    • Even if it was time to move away from Pressbooks as an institution, I think the EPUB, PDF, XHTML, and WXR exports could each be used to help me keep access to my content or use it in a different way. The EPUB or PDF might work great in a library's institutional repository. The XHTML file is great for cutting and pasting into Microsoft Word or Google Docs because it has all the structured data of the book, including at the headings, alt text, etc. The WXR file could be used to import into a WordPress site. There are options, and as long as I own my own data and have access to exports, I have a way forward.
When someone promises free forever, I get worried. Forever is a really long time. You might really mean it, and I might even trust you, but what about when you get your next dream job and the next guy comes in? What if you don't get that next big grant? That's why for sustainability purposes, I prefer to think about contingencies like, if it were mission critical for my center, could I run this myself? Can I get my data into another useable format?

It's all part of the sustainability of our labor, that the work we do today continues to be useful in the future.

If anyone wants to talk more about migrating data, I've done a lot of that over the past few years, moving things into and out of Pressbooks, moving things into and out of Lumen Learning's Pressbooks that they call Candela. The more you do that kind of migration work, the more I think you value it. The fact that Pressbooks works as a federated network and you can easily clone content from one server to another to have your own copy of the texts that your institution is using is a really powerful thing. Even the old Lumen Learning Pressbooks that were moved to Course Hero are still cloneable for now, so for people who want that content, you should go grab it.

anne.gruber

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Jul 31, 2022, 9:46:14 AM7/31/22
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Justina et al.,
What a great conversation! I'm at an institution that has never had Pressbooks & it remains to be seen if we'll commit any resources to authoring software beyond the OEN Manifold pilot we're participating in now. With staffing & budget limitations university-wide (I know we're not alone there), even a self-hosted solution might be a tough sell, so I appreciate hearing lots of options in this conversation.

The following brief article by Joe Letriz about University of Dubuque's self-hosting solution for Pressbooks might be helpful for some. They are a small private with limited resources & I thought the article was helpful in terms of providing specifics about their process.
Letriz, J. (2022). Local Hosting of Faculty-Created Open Education Resources. Information Technology and Libraries, 41(1). https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ital/article/download/13803/11131/

Best,
Anne Marie H. Gruber  (she/they)
Liaison & Textbook Equity Librarian
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Joshua Halpern

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Aug 1, 2022, 12:00:30 PM8/1/22
to CCCOER Community Email
anne, et al

Thanks for the pdf. Hidden in there is the (unstated) cost of doing the work. Most of that is start up, but there is a continuing effort and time spent running the instance which is time that could be used for other things. I would not be surprised if it exceeded the cost of using a central repository as there are economies of scale. It's not just IT, but a major part of their effort went into training and helping their faculty users. Again, functions where a consortium could at least relieve part of the burden. 

They were smart in building their Pressbooks instance into their AWS contract (which also costs money) because that relieved them of having to monitor and maintain the server 24/7.  Putting a server in a closet is not, in my opinion, a very good solution especially before finals

Josh Halpern

Amy Song

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Aug 2, 2022, 11:19:16 AM8/2/22
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Hi everyone,

Sustainability is a huge concern for OER and for us here at Pressbooks. It’s been great for me and our team to see the conversations and constructive criticism on here, all of which we’ve been reading and learning from since this thread began. The reason I’m hopping on this thread is to clear up some facts about our new service at pressbooks.pub.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, the platform and the model employed at the pressbook.com network was not sustainable and did not serve the needs of the OER community as well as it could have. As a result, we will no longer host books at pressbooks.com as of September 29th. But please note: We will preserve openly licensed books! Public books with an open license will be migrated to a new url on pressbooks.pub and redirects will be set up so readers are not confused. These books will be hosted in a read-only state for free. 

If the authors would like to edit and revise these books at the new url, this is where they will need a subscription. Subscriptions start at $12 per month. You can read more about our pricing tiers.

Our new network, pressbooks.pub, is designed so that many of the important educational features in Pressbooks are available to individual authors. Features like the ability to be included in the Presbooks Directory, analytics in your dashboard to measure page views, interactive quiz building and other H5P interactives are available now to individuals, many of which were previously only available with institutional agreements.

To learn more, please read our full announcement. Our hope is that these changes will better support creation and dissemination of OER resources. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at feed...@pressbooks.com – we would be happy to continue the conversation about the pricing.

Happy discussing,

Amy

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cbeals

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Aug 4, 2022, 4:59:41 PM8/4/22
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I have retracted my previous message as I needed time to read and think. 

Thank you Amy for clarifying  that PB will be preserving already existing OER, even if they are orphaned works. That is great. I do still worry about the subscription model and the fact that authors cannot edit without paying. A lot of OER are created with one time grant opportunities and thus a subscription doesn't fit with that type of project funding. For myself, I would love to add H5P to my PB textbook, but at $400/year, paying out of my own pocket, that is just not possible for me. I also still worry about authors who may want to edit their OER to make them more accessible, and now are locked behind a paywall to do so. That puts the burden on instructors to make the OER accessible, and that may hold them back from using the resource and other OER. 

I have loved using Pressbooks and I am sad to see it go to this model, although I do appreciate that at least OER already created will be preserved. Thank you Amy, for the clarification, and thank you PB for sending out emails to OER creators for more details. I think a lot of us in the OER community are a little on edge about sustainability and I am glad to see that is still important to PB. 

Charity Davenport  

Instructional Technology Specialist (Accessibility) 

Pellissippi State Community College 

Pellissippi Academic Center for Excellence (PACE)

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