Cloning a (private) book in our own network

Hello Pressbooks community,

The books on our network are currently private. We’d like to be able to clone one of our books or clone select chapters of a book in our network. Is that possible? Or does the book need to be made public for it to be cloned (even if cloning within one’s own network)?

Thank you so much!!

Hi @shuchi users with super admin rights on a network should be able to clone internally within their network even when books don’t have open licenses or are private. If you’re having trouble with this you could always make the book (briefly) public, perform the clone and then change the permissions/license on both the target and source book right after the clone completes. You can also perform Pressbooks XML exports/imports to bring content from one book shell to another, though this won’t grab H5P activities.

Thank you, @SteelWagstaff! I had been having some problem cloning internally within the network earlier. But I tried it again, and it seemed to work!

On a related note: I’d like to be able to clone a single chapter within a book. I want to create a chapter that is a “template chapter”. And then anyone needing to add a chapter to that book should clone the template chapter to create a new chapter, and then edit this new cloned chapter. Is that possible? If not, any suggestion for a way to achieve this effect (other than copy/paste of the template chapter into the new chapter)?

Thank you!

hi @shuchi you can clone smaller parts of books using our Import tool: Import – Pressbooks User Guide. To clone part of a book, choose ‘web page’ as the option and provide the book URL – you’ll see an interface that shows you all of the available chapters in a cloneable book. From there, you’ll be able to clone/import only the parts/chapters you desire. See Making Public Domain Anthologies with Pressbooks - YouTube for a short demo from a webinar we gave a couple years ago.

Thank you so much @SteelWagstaff! This will help us tremendously.

1 Like