 Hi, everybody, welcome to the July Pressbooks product update. I'm Steel Wagstaff, the product manager. And I'm excited to share with you a bunch of the projects and things that we have worked on over the last month or so and released to our users for both Pressbooks and the Pressbooks directory. If you wanna follow along, we have an agenda here that covers a lot of what we're doing. I just posted it into the chat. I'm gonna start by sharing with you the big news. Basically, if you didn't see the news, Moby is a proprietary ebook export format that is really only used by Amazon, Amazon Kindle. And for many years, the Kindle Direct Publishing was the last of the big ebook stores that still required or would accept Moby files. And so we supported it for a long time. Amazon has announced that they've finally deprecated and they're ending support for Moby. You can still load Moby files onto your Kindles, but their Kindle Direct Publishing will not be taking Moby files anymore. And they recommend that users send EPUB files instead. We think that's great news. And now that Amazon's made that change, there's no real need for us to produce Moby exports anymore. So we have removed the Moby export option from Pressbooks. So you'll notice now the export menu doesn't have the Moby option anymore, it just has the EPUB options. If you've already made Moby exports, we won't delete them, they'll still be there. If you're sharing them for download, they'll still be there, they can still be downloaded. You just can't make new Moby exports. If you were making Moby exports to load on your own Kindle, they call it side loading. There are still two ways that you can do that pretty easily with free software. There's a software program called Caliber and one called Kindle Previewer. You can take Pressbooks EPUBs and turn them into Mobies for personal use using those tools and we link to how you can do that. So that's the first big announcement or big change. If anybody has questions about that, I'm happy to take those or answer them in the chat. All right, so goodbye Moby. The other thing that we did was, a lot of people are trying to do math expressions and if you know in Pressbooks, if you use Pressbooks for a while, you can say like, you can say, you could click a button and create a footnote like this. And when you click the button and make your footnote, what you'll see is the footnote short code gets added. Well, people really liked being able to make footnotes that way. And they said, making math at LaTeX is kind of difficult. Could you do something similar with LaTeX? And the answer is yes. So now here's a big hairy math expression. You can simply select it and click the LaTeX button. And what you'll notice is it just wraps it in that LaTeX short code that we use to render something as math. So I can also do it with a smaller equation. Or if you wanna write a new equation, you can just click LaTeX, you'll see a little prompt and you can enter your math expression here. There you go. So I made a third math expression. Now I'm gonna save this chapter and you'll notice now these short codes are all being processed normally. And if I view the chapter, this turns into beautiful, well-formatted math. In the web book, it will be rendered with math jacks. Our related changes previously, when you made math expressions that had the greater than symbol, the PDF exports would sometimes break because this wasn't being properly escaped in the alt description, which would cause the tag to open or to close too soon. So we fixed that bug and those exports will now work correctly. Another bug that we fixed has to do with image placement. So this was kind of a deeper cut, but if you had been working with them, you would have seen them. If you entered an image and aligned it left or aligned it right or even aligned it center, but you didn't add a caption. So these are images without captions. In the PDF exports, they wouldn't always be aligned properly. So we fixed that. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a new export here and show you both all of these things working as they should in the PDF. And I'll make it in print so you can see another new feature. So I'm making a print PDF export for this book. All right, so I made a new print export and you'll now notice that before we were differentiating between digital PDF and print PDF just with color. One was green and the other was red. That isn't great for people with color blindness. And so we've changed the icon to say print PDF. So it's a bit clearer now if you're relying on the icon. Let me download this and show you now what the book looks like. So here's that test book that I made. You'll notice, okay, my image has been properly floated left, properly floated right, properly center aligned, even though they don't have captions. And then here's my math. The one that has the greater than sign, it didn't break the export anymore. So those are a couple of fixes that we shipped and that we think people will appreciate if you've noticed those problems in previous books, you can just regenerate the exports and they should be working now. Special shout out and thanks to Ricardo for fixing the greater than sign one which was causing us problems for months. So thank you, Ricardo. The other thing that we've been working on have been cover images. So if you used to work with old press books, you probably saw that default typewriter book that for many years was the default cover image. We now have a new default cover image for generic books and it's more colorful and it's a bit more attractive. So if you haven't uploaded a cover image for your book, this will be the generic cover image now. So it's press books, you're partnered up and publishing and it's just a fun, more colorful image that's used as the default placeholder. There was a lot of confusion about what cover images are and do and how they're used. So we significantly rewrote this guide chapter and let me just kind of talk you through and explain the differences between cover images. These are kind of confusing. So when you're making books, there are three different kinds of cover images that matter. Kind number one is what we would say is the web book cover or the internal eBook cover, which means that it's displayed on your homepage of your web book and will be included with your ePub exports as the cover of that eBook. There's a second kind of image which is called the marketing cover for your eBook. This only matters with an eBook distribution store. So if you made an eBook and you wanted to sell it on Amazon or put it on the Apple Store or Kindle Direct Publishing, they will let you add a cover that's used for marketing purposes that displays in their catalog or whatever. So that's separate. And the third kind of cover only matters if you're doing print on demand and that's called a PDF cover. This usually when you upload a book for print on demand with the print on demand service, they'll say, okay, give us your book's interior files and give us your cover layout or your cover spread. The difference with the PDF cover, it's distinct because it is both the front cover, picture of your book, the spine of your book and the back cover because they print those all together when they print your print on demand book. You don't need a back cover obviously to display on your web book and their eBooks don't really have back covers. So the print PDF cover is distinct. What I'm gonna talk about first is the web book internal eBook cover. So for example, this book has a test, this is the default web book internal eBook cover. The way that you change that has always been through book info. But what we've done is we've clarified the instructions for this. So it says, this image will be displayed on the web book homepage. I'll make it a little bigger if you're trying to follow along at home and used as the internal cover in eBook exports. Cover images must be at least 800 pixels tall and have an aspect ratio between 0.66 and one. That means the ratio between the width and the height. So 0.66 to one means that the width must be two thirds of the height or equal to the height. So you can't have a cover image that's wider than it is tall and you can't have a cover image that's much taller than it is wide. And we'll give you a little warning. If you upload a really, really large image, we will resize it so that it's a sensible downsized smaller image because it's only being used in the web book and the internal eBook. So it doesn't have to be giant. So that's all gonna happen silently for you as you upload. Let me show you about how this process works. So first I'm gonna upload a cover image that I want to use. This is a good new cover image that I'm ready to use. So I'm gonna upload this cover image and I'm gonna click save. That happened to be a really huge file. Book information has been updated and you'll notice here's my new cover image. You will also see the most recent cover image in your media library if you ever want to know where it's at. Here it is, that's that one. And if I were to go to visit my homepage, you can see we replaced the cover image with the image I just uploaded. That's how you change the cover image. Now, if you do a cover image that doesn't meet the criteria, let me show you what that looks like and what will happen. So here I will choose a file that this one is the same picture, but it's too small. It doesn't have enough pixels. And it told me here, your cover image was not saved because it is too small and it told me the dimensions. It was only 750 pixels tall. It should be at least 800 pixels in height. So then I would need to know, okay, I need to pick a bigger image for my cover image. Similarly, this case, I'm gonna pick an image that's wider than it is tall. So the aspect ratio is wrong. And if I choose that image, what will happen will be a similar error message. My cover image was not saved because the aspect ratio, it was 1.71 times wider than it was tall is outside the permitted range. And then we give you a recommended aspect ratio of 0.75. That's a nice good average. Now I'm gonna do the same thing, but the image is gonna be much taller than it is wide. So again, this is also a bad cover image because it's too narrow. And we'll see a similar aspect ratio error except that it's telling me, oh, it's 0.56. It needs to be at least 0.66 to be validated. So in these cases, none of those cover images were saved and it just stayed with the last one I had. If you aren't satisfied with your cover image and wanna remove it, there's always this delete button. You can see it, delete that file and you'll notice it just reverts back to the default and you can go back there for cover images. So those are some changes in improvements we made to that cover image process. Hopefully that's a little bit clearer for people who want to make just the web book cover and the internal ebook. The thing that you'll notice also is if you want to make a marketing ebook cover or a cover for your print PDF, there is a tool under export called the cover generator. This will allow you to create a cover for PDF exports or for your marketing ebook covers. And you can add some sample text and you can have a background color or a background image and it will give you some very specific guidelines that you have to follow because for the PDF, it needs to match very exact dimensions based on the export size of your book. And it will also calculate the spine width based on how many pages are in your book and it will automatically calculate that based on your last export. So this tool is helpful for creating those other kinds of cover images. We didn't make any major changes to this cover export routine yet. Just letting you know that if you're trying to do something for those other two types of covers, this is a tool that you can use. If all you're trying to make is a marketing cover for your book or you're trying to design a cover, we would generally recommend using something like InDesign or a free tool on the web called Canva or something like that. Canva is nice because it has a book cover template. So you can use this tool called Canva to quickly make nice looking book covers that generally will fit the dimensions that you want them to be. The thing you need to make sure of is that it needs to be at least 800 pixels tall. So for example, I used Canva not too long ago, my wife published a book with press books and I use Canva to make this very simple spare cover. And it took me like 10 minutes maybe to make this cover. Steel, do you see the, do you see this being the main path forward for the time being is focusing on kind of digital covers within press books? Just asking, because we have a template. It currently fits all the guidelines. I'm just curious if there's ever gonna be a move to like requesting higher resolution files or anything like that. So, no, for the web book and the ebook cover, no, it'll always be, those files never need to be large. In fact, sometimes in the past, many people were adding files that were much too large. And then it was wasteful because we weren't, you know, like they had uploaded a huge file and sometimes we were displaying the huge file instead of the depth. This image, you can see it's not that big. It doesn't need to be 6,000 pixels, right? Now, if you're doing it for your PDF export, there will be pixel dimensions there because they need to print it at whatever size of paper you have. So in those cases, you need to follow whatever pixel guidelines the PDF generator tool tells you. But if all you're thinking about is what your book looks like on the web and then your EPUB exports, then just follow those existing guidelines. That's the way to go, it won't be changing. Yeah, that was a great question. Thanks. And then Perva in the chat chimed in to say, Canva is very helpful for people designing the front covers. She, they've worked with people at Rebus that have made the covers with Canva and found it very easy to use. So there may be other tools. I don't mean this to be like a Canva advertising pitch, but it's just one, a tool that I know of that's free and pretty easy to use for people. A couple other bugs. I don't know if I need to show them. There was a bug that was affecting in particular, I'll just show it. I probably won't show the whole bug, but I'll just show you what I mean by it. If you're using the McLuhan theme or the Malala theme, you can go into your web options and override the default typeface for whatever typeface that you'd like. So we have a bunch of supported open typefaces that you can kind of mix and match and customize the typeface or the font that's used in your book. There was a bug with the GNU free font family where I had broken something accidentally with a commit and those fonts weren't being embedded properly. If you want to use those fonts, they work now again and everything's back to normal. The other change that we made that you may want to know about, this is more for network managers. There's a series of emails that we will send when events happen. We call them transactional emails. So if you're a network manager and you add a new user to your network, so let me say I'm gonna add somebody called Steelfake to my network. Whenever we register a new user or you add a new book, there will be emails that are sent out from the Pressbook service to the person who's affected. And sometimes you might get notifications if you signed up for notifications. We made a change so that all of those transactional emails for the networks that we host will now come from NoReply at pressbooks.com. No matter whether your network is university.pub or Berkeley.edu or whatever, we're always gonna send the transactional emails from the same email address for the networks we host. We're doing this for two reasons. One, it's just simpler to manage it across all the networks that way. Oops, already. And two, increasingly there's something called DMARC, which is a way to validate that the email does in fact come from the domain that it says it's coming from. Well, we don't control your email domains. So if the email was supposedly coming from Berkeley.edu, Pressbooks isn't actually sending it from Berkeley.edu. We're sending it from a domain that we control. And so people with very strict DMARC policies would sometimes have those emails flagged by spam. Because we're sending it from a domain that we control, we can ensure that it won't get sent to spam and will be considered a valid email by those strict filters. And it just seems like it makes more sense to send it from a NoReply email address so people know like, this isn't a human. This is a robot sending you an email. So here's the new registration email. I think you're seeing my screen and you can see that it was sent from NoReply at Pressbooks.com. And I was notified that a new user had just been registered. There was a question in the chat, which was were the emails previously coming from Pressbooks at URL of your network? Yes, they were previously coming from that URL. And you can still customize the text and the text will be sent however you customize it. It's just the from address will be NoReply at Pressbooks.com rather than Pressbooks at your root URL, which was not a real email address anyway. So that's what we did there. You may have noticed that Pressbooks will keep track of your revisions. Sometimes this revision count will get really, really huge and it can cause loading problems for your pages. So we recently implemented a change on our servers which will cap the number of revisions that we store at 50. You'll notice this the next time you go to save a revision. So if you look for this chapter, you can see here are my last 50 revisions. They were one was made a year ago. If I were to make a change here and save it, you'll notice this number will stay at 50. It won't go higher. And all of this revision will be discarded. So we're now saving just the 50 most recent revisions for your chapters. This will definitely decrease the size of your database. It should increase the performance of your network, but just know that if you need a revision that's more than 50 revisions ago, those will start being discarded when you save them. So the last thing to share is we've made some changes and improvements to the SAML SSO plugin. So some of you are doing single sign-on with your university accounts and we've just improved the way that we do the user matching and the login. And we've also improved how we log users out at the end of their session. So if you haven't already done it and you are doing SAML configuration, the thing that you'll want to make sure that you're doing, let me just, if you have SAML set up and configured here, what you'd want to do is make sure that you add the correct log out service URL for your identity provider. And then when that's in place, what will happen is when you log in as a SAML user, so I'll just show you a sample SAML user. We're logging in with this fake service. This person's logged in at Pressbooks with their university account. And then when they're done, they can click log out and it will take them to the SAML your identity provider's log out page. It will display whatever log out message you share and it will confirm for them, you have successfully logged out. The log out operation complete, no other services. That was good. So the next time I come to integrations, I can see that I really am logged out. And if I were to click sign in again and click SAML again, it doesn't remember me. I have to reenter my credentials. So that's a good idea if you're using the SAML plugin to make sure that you've worked with your identity provider to configure that log out flow because we will actually log the users out and avoiding the problems for like saving session cookies and those kinds of things. I'm gonna pause and say those were our Pressbooks product updates. Great. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about then are the updates that we made to the Pressbooks directory. And this will probably be the most impactful. So if you haven't been before, the Pressbooks directory is a huge directory of books published across nearly 100 Pressbooks networks. Here's the URL in the chat. And this is growing all the time. We are regularly syncing and pulling in any changes that people make to their books that are published. So your network ought to be included here as soon as you publish a book, it can be listed in this directory. And this is where we're letting people find books to use. If you haven't been there before, there's a tour button that will kind of introduce you to its features. It will kind of walk you through what the directory is and how it works. You can take that on your own time. You'll notice that we're curating collections. So this is something that our marketing team is doing. They're gonna be creating new collections regularly and adding them here. They're picking a sample of several books on a given topic that they think are a high quality and of interest. So for example, there's an accessibility collection. And if you click that button, you'll see here are eight really high quality books on the topic of accessibility that you might be interested in reading, cloning, adapting or using in some way. You can do the same thing for right now, high enrollment, open education, books with lots of interactive OER or the topic of healthcare. So if you click healthcare, you'll notice that the filters changed. You're showing 16 healthcare books and you can turn that filter on this way and that way. So some changes that we made, we made a ton of accessibility improvements. When we relaunched this with a new kind of branded face. So if you notice anything that's still not fully accessible, let us know. But we think this is a fully accessible site that can be navigated by users from screen readers and other assistive technology. Another thing that we did was we are now adding a few queries or a few of the query information to the URL itself. So if I typed history here, you'll notice this gets added to the URL. But if I change the number of books per page, so let's say I wanna show 50 per page, that also gets added to the URL. And so does the page that I'm on. So I'm on page three now and you can see that got added to the URL. And we've also changed the default sort order. So the default sort order is now gonna be something that we call relevance and there's two other sort options. You can see the books that have been most recently updated first. So now we've just changed the sort order to recently updated. So this book was updated on the 20th. This book was updated in June. So you can now see when books were last edited or updated. Or you could sort by alphabetical order. If you don't wanna see relevance, you just wanna see all results in alphabetical order. And all of these parameters are then added to the URL. So what's cool about this is that you can take this URL and you can share it with someone and they will see the same results that you saw, updated of course dynamically. So if this changed tomorrow, a new book was added, the results would return whatever was added tomorrow. There's also a little button here that lets you copy this query and share it really easily. So you could also just do that, copy the query and then email it or share it with someone. Another thing that we've done is we're now displaying the number of H5P activities in a more obvious way right here. So let me show you, there's a filter here that lets you see books that only have five or more H5P activities. So here are history books with more than five H5P activities and this will just give you a quick count. You can just see it visually here and you'll also see the H5P logo here that tells you this book has H5P. There you can see the old press books cover that we've replaced, but if you're pining for it. And there you can see that very nice cover template that the Ohio State University uses that Mike was mentioning. All of their books will have a recognizable theme in that they've got this little banner and a nice looking professionally designed cover. Another thing that you can do if you've built a query and you want to get rid of it, of course you can clear it out and clear it out but you can also always just come to the top and click this and it takes you back to the homepage and clears all the queries that you have if you ever want to clear your filters. Smaller changes, we added commas to numbers that are bigger than 2000. We think that makes it easier to read. Here's a very large number. The comma helps you read it more easily. We're using the US convention rather than the European convention of commas for thousands of places and periods for decimal places. We're also doing a better job of handling covers. So this is not a sexy change, but it helps because the page will load much faster. Each of these covers are now a smaller thumbnail version of the cover rather than the full size cover image. So some of the cover image changes I was showing you in press books are being inherited here. So this page will just load much faster. These covers are smaller versions of all of your covers and they're gonna load much faster. And then we did some changes to improve this site's meta and searchability. So it's easier to find for people that are looking for books on the web. Apart from that, I think those are the big changes in the press books directory. I'm gonna pause there and ask for questions. What do you wanna know about press books directory or changes we made there? Thanks, Jamie. Okay, so that concludes the presentation portion for what I wanted to share with the new features that we had released in the press books product and press books directory. Again, thanks for your patience and listening to all that and a special thanks to the developers who worked hard to make these changes possible. Ricardo is here in the chat and there's a few more that aren't. And also special thanks to the people who suggested product ideas for us. I wanted to say thanks again, everybody, for joining us for this month's product meeting. We really appreciate all that you do for open education. We love making software that meets your needs and we do wanna know about the things that you need just like Rama shared in today's meeting. Please keep those ideas and feature requests coming and we'll be excited to share with you what we've built in the future. Hopefully, Rama, the next time we do this, I hope that we can have something to show you that makes you happy.