Abstract
There is a huge and important push in academia towards Open Textbooks. This is as much about academia controlling the tools of their information trade as it is about lowering costs and increasing accessibility for students. This webinar will explore some thoughts about how the Open Textbook movement can become a thriving ecosystem, and how university library and academic publishing centers can contribute to making that vision a reality.
About Hugh McGuire
“Literary technologist” Hugh McGuire is the founder of LibriVox, a open source publisher of public domain audiobooks, and pressbooks.com, an online book production platform. Pressbooks is being used by a variety of Open Textbook projects, including BC Campus (in Canada), University of Minnesota, Lumen Learning and others. Pressbooks recently launched Pressbooks EDU, focused on academia, and in particular Open Textbooks.
Hugh is also co-editor, with Brian O’Leary, of Book: a Futurist’s Manifesto — Essays from the bleeding edge of publishing, published by O’Reilly in 2012
About Pressbooks
Pressbooks EDU can turn any faculty, department or library into a mini-publisher, giving them the ability to create books that are accessible on all platforms: in print, and on all smartphones, tablets, Kindles and computers. In addition to supporting open textbooks projects,Pressbooks is already working in academia, by powering the publication of scholarly monographs, course texts, dissertations and other documents. Pressbooks clients include The University of Minnesota Press, Tufts University School of Medicine, Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan Library, Harvard Business Review Press and Fortress Press.