 Hi everybody, welcome to the June press books monthly product update. I'm still waxed at the product manager and we have a lot of exciting things that we're looking forward to sharing with you today. The most exciting thing I guess to share is not actually a product change, it's a person. I don't want to introduce you to and I want to just say we're really pleased we had a very extensive and important search to find and hire our first UX and UI designer. For people that don't know UX stands for user experience and UI is user interface and the designer role was a really important one that we were missing at press books and we are missing that no longer because we've hired Michelle. I wanted to hand over to Michelle to introduce yourself and say a few words about what brought her here. Thank you. So yes, I'm Michelle Waremczuk and I am press books new UX UI designer. So I have a background in design. I began as an exhibit designer at the Royal Alberta Museum and worked there for about nine years. So I've always had a real interest in experience design especially learning in physical spaces and over my career I've really also learned and adopted a lot of digital experience design techniques and methods and so that's what I'm going to be helping with here at press books, making sure that the interfaces are understandable, work the way that you or any users should imagine it to, which also means I'm going to be doing a lot of testing on the site and different adjustments that we're thinking about making with press book users. So I'm here and I'm really excited to support this community. Well thank you Michelle. So the two things that I want to say are one, one of the big projects we expect to begin working on soon as many of you know is a redesign of the network catalog provided by Alvin. This has been long desired, long awaited in the works and we're planning based on the feedback that others have given here and other places grievously to make the Alvin catalog look and feel much more like the press books directory in terms of its functionality and appearance. So that Michelle is going to be helping lead that project here. We're probably going to be starting that in our very next sprint in July and we would love to hear, I believe Michelle will probably be contacting some of you or many of you to be user, to give your user experience feedback as we start to do some UX research and things like that. So if you want to help by giving feedback or know of users who you think would give useful feedback for us, that's something that we're going to begin doing more as Michelle has the professional skills and experience to do that well for us in the future. The next thing that I wanted to do is actually hand it over to someone else who's in the meeting for press books. A colleague Thomas is our documentation and support specialist and he's going to give an overview of several improvements and changes that he's made to documentation over the last few months. Hi everyone. I think some of you may have corresponded with me over email in the past. Aside from doing technical support, part of my role here is to maintain and update the documentation, primarily the user guide and network manager guide. The guides that I inherited when I began here were quite sprawling. There was a fair amount of redundant info and made it hard to find certain things. And there were also some broken links and some outdated material that I had to correct. So some of the work has been cleaning up the guides, consolidating chapters and kind of organizing them in a way that aims to be more simple and intuitive. Network manager guide has been overhauled in this way recently. And that's also involved setting up redirects for previous chapter URLs whenever those have moved. I'm also working on increasing the coverage of the docs or how much material the guides cover. Which is an ongoing project. For example, I've been adding more material on using press books results for LMS in the network manager guide. This chapter is one that I've added this past month on customizing LTI 1.3 settings. I'm also adding videos that, in addition to the written instructions for certain things to demonstrate them that way. And yeah, I'm always sort of trying to improve these guides. And if there are ways in which the documentation could better achieve that like material that you'd like us to include in there, please feel free to let me know at the premium support email address. Right now I'm using the questions that come into that inbox as a kind of index of what needs to be added. But if you have any particular requests or suggestions, any feedback is definitely welcome. Awesome. Thank you. And I want to say just as an observer, I've been involved with press books for a long time. And the work that Thomas has done on these guides and the kind of how proactive he's been on documentation, I think has been awesome. And I really, really appreciate it just as a person in this community. Okay. So I think what you can expect in the next couple of months is basically what Thomas said that as we get repeated support questions in, we'll be adding and clarifying documentation. If you are aware of things that your users are having a hard time doing or that you think docs are missing or could be added, please let us know and we'll try to add them as quick as we can. The other thing that Thomas has been doing that I think has been really valuable is for some of the more complicated processes that have multiple parts, he started making videos that show the steps from beginning to end. We're not going to make videos for everything because some things are, you know, they change quite frequently. But for things that seem pretty stable and pretty repeated, we're happy to make more of these kind of training videos. So if you're aware of a topic that you think could really use a video or you like a video showing it, let us know and we can start making more of those. So those are the two things we want to share up front. I think what you're hopefully seeing is that there has been an increased emphasis and will be on the user experience. We want to make sure that we're making software for people and that it works for the people that want to use it. So over the next few months, I think you'll probably also see other changes that are designed to help improve the onboarding experience for brand new users, the overall experience for network managers, and just make press books easier to use and navigate because we know there's a, I mean, it's a very complicated dashboard with lots and lots of features and anything that we can do to reduce that cognitive overload or overhead so that people can more quickly and easily publish the things they want to publish would be a win for us and hopefully a win for the people who are trying to publish things. So that's who we want to share first. What I'm going to do next is show you a demonstration of some of the recent features and things that we have released and that we've been working on on our team. So the first thing that I want to share actually is related to the user dashboard. So what you'll notice now is when a regular user logs into the press books dashboard, we've changed kind of the initial dashboard display to make things a little clearer and easier for them to get started. So the first thing that's going to happen is here's a user that already has a couple of books and they're going to see it get started with press books box. It says welcome to name of the network, get started on your next publishing project by creating a new book or cloning an existing book. It gives them a link to the directory where they can find thousands of books to clone. And then there's two very simple icons that take them to the creative book or the clone of book routine. If you're a brand new user and haven't created a book, the message will be slightly different, but that's just the welcome orientation message. So hopefully this is clear first steps or next steps for anyone using press books. The other thing that we added was this was based on feedback from both Amy and from Thomas is we wanted to make it easier for people to know where they could get out or the sport resources if they're stuck with something. So this is a new widget that's added to the dashboard everywhere. It just says need help and it shows them several places they can go for help. The most common is the user guide. There's also the YouTube channel where Thomas has been adding new training videos. Anyone is welcome to attend a live training webinar. If you haven't been to this link before, it's going to show you a schedule on our website of upcoming trainings that Amy or others at press books will offer. So there's a getting started with press books webinar which is intended for beginning new users. We typically offer that every month and then there's an advanced webinar which is like once you've started and want to use some of the advanced educational features. Those are offered on a regular basis, typically once enough and you can see a schedule and register and attend those at no charge. We also have a link to the community forum which is a place where open source users can discuss ideas or features and where you can also go and answer other people's questions. This is not the premium support channel but it's a place where any of our open source users can discuss issues and ideas within one another. We try to monitor this and respond occasionally but it's mainly for users to ask questions of other users and help one another out. If you've listed an email address we say for additional support contact your network manager and we display the email address of the support email that you've listed. Lauren asked a question in the chat she said regarding the new get started with press books box. If someone has been invited to be a part of a book but it's the first time they log into press books will they see the create clone book buttons? Yes provided that they have permission to create a clone book like if you don't allow people to create books on your network then it won't show but generally yes but what they'll also see is there's going to be a bar above it with all of their pending invitations so if you have a pending invitation that shows up first and then beneath it it will say get started so hopefully they won't get confused with that choice they'll see their pending invitation and then accept it and they'll be good there. The thing I wanted to show you next though is if you're a network manager and you want to change the email address that appears to users here's how you can do that so I've got to open a new window network managers have this thing here that lets them customize the root site of their network so you would click dashboard here you'd click appearance and customize and you're going to find a contact form and there is a contact email which is the contact email for your network you can change this to be whatever email you would like or remove it and have no email or whatever but if you enter an email here that's the contact email that this form will go to it's also the email address that will be displayed to to users on that page so I'm going to in this case I'm going to remove the contact email and turn off the contact form and then I'll show you what what users will see if you don't have a contact email listed all right so I'm going to refresh the screen here and you're going to notice this sentence will go away because I no longer have a contact email listed so that's how you can customize the contact email that's shown to users if you don't want them to send you help support requests or if you just don't need a contact method if you are providing a press books network it probably is time to your users to have a way that they can contact you with questions and support but that's up to you we're not going to require you to do it okay the next thing is a pretty minor change it's like deep cuts if you love trade publishing but there is something available in press books when you go to your book info there is generally there's a couple of ways to enter subject terms most people use these FEMA subject terms which are the preferred method for doing things but if you're in the U.S. bookselling trade and your the store you work with requires bisack subject terms there's something called bisack subject terms it's the I can't remember what it stands for but it's a U.S. trade book publishing trade company and they have a bunch of subject headings they release a new version of their subject list every year press books purchases that list and integrates it with our software so we've updated to the most recent release of the bisack subject terms so I don't know all the subject terms but some of these are new I don't know if antiques and collectibles canadiana is new but you can now indicate that your book is on the subject of canadiana antiques and collectibles like you've always wanted so there you go that we've updated the bisack subject terms and that's available now in all of the press books networks that we host and in open source versions of press books we've made a few changes to the lti plug-in that we provide and results for lms there were two in particular there were two kinds of pages that people sometimes wanted to link to so now you can produce an lti link which launches your main press books network dashboard page or main press books network page so let me show you that this is an lti link when launched it's going to load the landing page for your press books network and you will be logged in as a user via lti so here is an lti link that shows you the main landing page of a press books network the other thing that we added support for which might be more commonly used is we also allow you to launch the admin dashboard of the press books page so as a user i could click this link and i could then see my dashboard embedded within the lms i don't think these are really common use cases most of the time people want to do this at press books itself rather than seeing it kind of constrained inside of an lms frame but if that's what you need or want to do for some reason you can do it now i will just explain the lti pattern for both of these links the url you need to enter would be the full url of your network followed by this pattern format lti launch and that will take you to the home page of your network if you wanted to launch the admin page the pattern for that url is going to be the full path to the admin page which would be your network slash wp slash wp admin followed by format lti launch and both of those will then resolve to the expected location we had someone who was asking about integrating h5p activities with lti with the lti plugin is i don't know much about that but is what you're demonstrating here um i don't know is i don't even know what i'm asking just someone brought it up in a meeting the other day so press books provides an add-on feature for enterprise networks called results for lms and what results for lms allows you to do is to add as many h5p activities as you would like to a press chapter to configure that chapter for grading and to connect it to your lms grade book that means that when a student launches the chapter they complete the activities and then the grade is automatically sent to their grade book we have videos and information about that particular add-on available elsewhere so i'm not going to go into huge detail about it now but the things that i was just showing are small changes to the lti plugin that is used by that product okay thank you other things that i wanted to share that we released several bug fixes that that um hopefully we'll fix some bugs that might have been frustrating or annoying one of the big ones was um users could unlist glossary terms which means you created a glossary term but you chose not to display it in your glossary lists when people were doing that those glossary terms actually weren't being included when the book was cloned because they were unlisted and it was causing some display problems in clone books we fixed that bug so that unlisted glossary terms are correctly cloned and will be included and the the references to glossary terms will be correct in the new books i don't think i need to demo that but if you were affected by it know that it's fixed and hopefully that's going better for you it wasn't affecting a lot of users but those that were it was annoying so if you have any questions for us thomas or i can handle those um through premium support another bug that we fixed i had to do with bulk actions that network managers could take from the book list or the user list um one of the delete the bulk action and delete had broken and we fixed that that's what the back and working as expected so you can now use the bulk actions from the user and book list and a third bug was um in the theme selector feature one of the fonts that people could select aligreia wasn't working properly it had been misnamed it's actually aligreous sounds and we fixed that so that now if you use that theme selector feature aligreous sounds will be embedded in your e-pub and pdf exports correctly um and that's something you can do in the clue in our malala anyone have questions about any of those things or feel like they need to see them um that concludes the big bug fix uh feature release updates that we have i'm going to actually switch gears and show you all something that we're working on that will be launched soon but isn't quite i mean it's happening soon it is probably going to be mostly of interest for people that are not at this call but um what we have been realizing is there are a lot of people that use press books for educational publishing they want to publish open textbooks they want to include h5p they want to do teaching and learning with open content and press books is the tool for them we think that we provide a really great set of services for people at institutions and people that have enterprise press books networks um but there's a lots of individuals that want to use those educational features but that don't have institutional affiliation and so we've been trying really hard to develop a product that will allow individuals without institutional affiliation to use educational press books features pressbooks.com is the old old site for self-published authors and there's a lot of problems with that it's grown very large there's lots of spam books it has a sub in sub domain installation and it's brittle and we can't do all the things on that network that we want to be able to do just because of infrastructure decisions we made a long time ago so the idea is that we're going to be launching a new subscription service for individuals that will allow them to have the educational features that people have come to expect and know in love from the enterprise version so i'm going to show you a quick preview of what's coming and how it can be used and then we'll be announcing this in like a much larger release soon so you're getting some peak or some preview all right so here i have a development network here and when a user clicks sign in they'll see a new kind of interactive page that allows them to sign into their existing account with uh username or password or if they don't have an account to register for a new account people can register with an email address and create a password or they can use any of these common social tools to integrate with an existing account so uh let's say i want to use my google account and i'm going to log in i have a lot of google accounts so let me use my gmail one i have now logged in and created a press books account with my gmail account creating a book is pretty similar to what it's always been i'm going to make a fake demo book and you'll see that when a person creates a book on this new network they'll be enrolled in a free trial that lasts for a week and in the free trial they'll be able to do all the things that they could do on the trial version of pressbooks.com there'll be a banner that tells you how long the trial lasts and when it's set to expire and they can do lots of the things that you can do with press books if you make exports that have watermarks etc etc then if they want to there will be an upgrade option and they'll be able to choose one of these subscription monthly subscription plans to upgrade their book you can select a self-publisher plan which would allow you to do all of these things for this price a month or a collaboration plan which gives you all of the high powered education features we had kind of been selling these individuals in a more complicated Byzantine way and so this is going to be a self-service kind of option here is a book that has been newly created it's on a free trial plan and if i like the free trial and i'd like to continue using press books on a subscription basis here's how i can do it i'm going to select a plan that i want to update upgrade to and it will take me to a stripe integration which will allow me to pay for a monthly subscription via credit card so this will tell me all the details of my subscription i can choose to do a monthly subscription or pay upfront for an annual subscription which is less expensive if you already purchased a upgrade on the old pressbooks.com service will provide you with the promo code which gives you credit or a discount or so you can add that there if you have it it will also assess tax for you if you're in canada because we press books is required to collect tax from people in canada normally what you do is you'd enter your information over here i have a test credit card that i've already entered but you'd enter your information i put a fake name in there and and then what i'll do is i'll click the subscribe button you'll see i have successfully subscribed to this so press books knows that i have an active subscription for this book and it's now telling me i'm on the self publisher plan here's when the plan will renew i can choose to manage my subscription anytime i could also add a premium support add-on which would allow me to do other things like file support tickets and get premium help from the press book staff even though i don't have an institutional uh subscription i can upgrade to collaboration pretty easily if i'd like so i could select this plan or click manage your subscription you click manage your subscription what will happen is you're brought into an interface where you see any of the uh subscriptions that you have you can choose to update your plan by switching to a yearly billing or moving to the other tier or i can go back and i switched to collaboration i'm going to confirm my new plan here's the amount that's due now i'm going confirm that so i've just changed to my the collaboration plan so if i went back to press books you'd see i'm now on the collaboration plan and if i want to cancel my plan at any point i can also do that from the manage my plan option and i'm going to say please cancel my plan and my plan will be canceled at the end of the term that i paid for so i can continue using these features until then but i will not be charged for additional renewal so i'm going to cancel this plan and you can tell us why you canceled i don't need it anymore and submit my feedback or you could skip that step and then when you go back to your book you'll see i'm on the collaboration plan but my plan will be canceled on this date if i change my mind i can renew do that so that's kind of what happens there you'll notice that now that i'm on the collaboration plan i now have h5p available to me and several of the other educational features that i may want to use including adding users and doing all the things that we want to do so that's sort of the new thing that's coming and i'll pause the demo there and say i awkwardly presented it any questions for me about what's going on and what's happening with this new product you you actually are just hitting something that i've encountered very recently with projects that need to exist outside of other networks and so using the they will dot-com version and then trying to figure out how to get h5p in there so i'm i'm happy to hear that you've read my mind and that the moving from the dot-com classic to this service you mentioned help with like the account if you've already purchased the purchase the book on the other network is there gonna be any migration assistance with that as well or jr you are a plant i love that question okay so here's what's happening we haven't announced it quite yet but it will be announcing will be coming in july but we're building a migration form that will be displayed on pressbooks.com and what it will allow people to do is request migration very simply so you can request any or all of the books or none of the books you have on pressbooks.com over the next several months and if you request migration we will clone and copy all of the content we'll move your user account over and then you'll get an automatic notification saying your book's been moved to the url we put redirects in place feel free to try it out and upgrade if you purchased the previous thing here's your promo code so we have an automated flow so we know that that's going to be an inconvenience for people to not be able to use pressbooks.com anymore especially long-term users we think that the new features and the way this is set up will be exciting for people and they'll want to use it more and so we want to try to minimize the disruption or the annoyance for anybody as much as we can the second thing to note is if you have a public openly licensed book on pressbooks.com and you don't want to pay for subscription we're not going to delete those books those are public good books we will continue to host those at the new service as read-only books free of charge indefinitely students won't be disrupted people who are lying on that content won't be disrupted and anyone who wants to of course can still clone that book and make copies and do it on the enterprise network or on this new service or wherever they like we're trying to avoid putting people out and and making things hard for them and we want to do the right thing by people even if they don't want to continue using pressbooks there the press yeah amy we haven't fully announced this yes but the intention is we're going to we're shutting down pressbooks.com and it will be replaced by this new service and we'd like to keep and migrate and move anything that's of use from pressbooks.com this the sad truth maybe i shouldn't say this on the recording but the sad truth is it turns out when you give people the ability to make free things on the internet there's a lot more spam than there is useful stuff so there's like a hundred and something thousand books on pressbooks.com of which well over 90 percent are either abandoned projects or spammy not not good stuff amy's got a hand up amy you want to ask a question yeah i think um i think you're answering this but i just want to make sure that i understand um so so legacy books that were created on pressbook.com will persist um but people won't be able to make new free accounts for longer than a week so i'm just thinking about the folks that i direct to pressbooks.com it's like you know if you want to experiment with pressbooks and play around and make a sandbox and just see how it works and if it might work for you you can go ahead and make this free account but if they did create something that they wanted to copy into the open or again network they'd have to do that within the space of a week is that the message that i should give people? Yes kind of um so what i'm doing right now is probably bad practice i'm telling people about a thing before it's been publicly announced so there will be a we have a communications plan that my colleague Lee will actually share it'll be professional it'll be we'll try to make everything very clear i'm going to try to clarify a couple pieces of things that i just said to make sure they're clear legacy books on pressbooks.com will be migrated it'll be a pressbooks.pub URL so they'll live it a new address with redirects in place so that if you went to the old site you would find it without being lost or interrupted that means free open the licensed books will get moved there and they'll live there forever if it wasn't an open the licensed book it was just a project that you made you will be able to migrate it and we're happy to migrate it for you and you can choose to try the trial out and if the trial expires you don't want it we'll get rid of your book or you could purchase a subscription and keep it as long as you want for books that are not open the licensed books the accounts never go away so if you have a pressbooks.pub account you can use that account you can create as many books as you want and they'll all have a seven-day free trial and then when the free trial is up you'll have a couple of weeks to decide do i want to keep it do i want to upgrade it before it's disposed of so i think the idea would be anybody who wants to can try out pressbooks you got a week to see if you like it if you like it and want to keep it there you can upgrade it if you don't want to keep it there you can move it to open oregon or to an enterprise or a self-hosted or wherever you think it should live that's not the new service and that's the intention so there'll be an official announcement in in the next couple of weeks there'll be a long announcement we'll begin display banners and we're going to be communicating via email with everyone that's affected we really don't want people to feel blindsided or lost or so i think the idea also is going to be it's just going to be an easier transition or flow for people so they say i start as a faculty user let's say there's three or four faculty user from the same institution that have been using pressbooks.pub it may make sense for them to say let's do this on an enterprise level and it'll be a really easy path for them to say we're going to stop paying for individual subscriptions we're just going to move to enterprise model enterprise subscription so hopefully it just seems less complicated and the product is more continuous educational features are what people generally want from pressbooks and we want to make that available to everybody whether you have it at an institution or whether you're just an individual who wants to publish something you want to publish thanks all for attending the webinar and we look forward to seeing you next month