Pressbooks for a children's book?

Using Pressbooks Custom CSS, Styling, Themes
1

We have an unusual use case from our College of Nursing. They created a 32-page 8.5"x8.5" children’s book using Adobe tools and have been self-publishing it for storytimes and outreach to K-6 audiences to encourage kids to consider nursing careers. The authors have asked about migrating the book to Pressbooks (so anyone could download the book and print it on their own). I don’t think Pressbooks is a good match for children’s book formats (no chapters, very large images, unusual page size).

I’m curious if anyone has tried using Pressbooks this way?

2

Hi @CherylCasey it can be done, but isn’t very common. You might want to talk with Michelle Reed at Library Futures. I think they did this with a couple of zines in the past. I’m thinking of https://pubs.libraryfutures.net/controlledchaos/. Maybe @olray also tried before? I don’t remember clearly.

3

Thanks for that example!

4

We have one collection of children’s stories: La hora del cuento en español

We basically created it as we would any other book. Because we already had the added issue of trying to have both the English and Spanish versions, we didn’t have the capacity to also explore different formats/print options.

Later, when the time came to update the book with more stories, we decided to publish on a Wordpress site: La hora del cuento en español – Storytime in Spanish

I do think it would be possible to create a print-only version and make that available for download. In the PDF Options you can set different page sizes, margins, etc, and you can set the CSS and use HTML page-breaks to make sure it works… but it would take a lot of time and experimentation.

If I had more capacity, I think I would enjoy the challenge.