There’s been a lot of “buzz” recently that blogging is dead. Not even close! One of the – many – beauties of blogging is its structure. This structure has allowed us to subscribe to sites with newsreaders and have our favorite sites delivered to our desktops. This structure has fueled the development of many amazing apps that collect content and present it in a beautiful magazine or newspaper format on any number of devices. Now, this structure is being used to develop collaborative platforms for writing, editing and publishing all kinds of content in an almost endless number of formats.
Hugh McGuire is the driving force behind PressBooks – a blog-based platform for building and publishing books – all kinds of books in all kinds of formats. This presentation introduces his vision for building books. Even without audio, his energy and enthusiasm is quite obvious.
Having worked with PressBooks for some time, I’m impressed with the platform. It costs nothing to create an account and start working on a publishing project. Individual authors and small publishers are welcome to publish via PressBooks at no cost. If you want custom epub designs or print templates, you can contact Hugh McGuire for pricing. I have several projects in various stages of completion so the only published copies I’ve created are of rough drafts. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised with the results.
I see many ways PressBooks can support the genealogy community. It’s collaborative features can help societies build and manage both quarterly journals and larger publishing projects. It easily supports multiple authors and peer review efforts. Add to that the ability to publish in both print and electronic formats – almost in a matter of minutes – and your society now has a very affordable way to extend the reach of their publications.
Individual authors can also benefit from PressBooks’ collaborative features. One of the biggest issues we face in publishing our family history projects is editing. Now you can invite others to review and comment on your manuscript – for both content and grammar. It’s always good to have more “eyes” look over manuscript and PressBooks offers a simply elegant way to do that. And, it tracks every revision to your content, allowing you to return to a previous draft at any time.
WordPress bloggers will immediately feel right at home in the PressBooks platform, but anyone who blogs will find it easy to use. It’s got a growing community of authors helping each other in the PressBooks forum – with more than just using PressBooks. If you are planning a writing project, take a look at PressBooks and see if its workflow will work for you. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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