 Hi everybody, welcome to the April Press Books product update. I'm Steel Wax staff, the product manager, and I'm excited to share some of the things that we are our team have been working on and have been releasing to our users recently. We have released some updates to the schemas that we use for book categories or book taxonomy. So the way that you'd find this is if you came into an individual book and you went into book info, you'll see a bunch of spots where you can fill in metadata about your book. And one of the sections that you'll see part way down is called subjects. And this allows you to categorize your book with the appropriate subject. In Press Books we use an international schema for book subjects called FEMA. And so we've updated a little bit the instructions here that help you understand what FEMA is. And we're also now including a link to their subject listing tool. So you can kind of scroll through and see, let's say I want to talk about open education. So I search here, if I can type it correctly, and it'll say, oh okay, the category heading that they use is called open learning distance education. That looks pretty good. Let's say I wanted to do math. And then you can see here's all the different subject headings for math. And you can look and find my book is the History of Mathematics and Open Education. So let's go ahead and pick a primary subject. We'll say history of mathematics. And then I might start typing open, open learning distance education. So I've just applied a primary subject and an additional subject. And that's, we've updated the FEMA terms and the instructions there, so that you can use the latest set of FEMA subject taxonomy in your book. You'll find that all of the FEMA updates were backwards compatible. So even though we have some new terms, if you're using old terms, they're still updated and functional. But it's just some nice tools there. A few people may be using what are called the BISAC subject headings, which are used specifically for the book publishing trade in the US. We really do recommend that people use the FEMA terms. But if you are in BISAC, we also updated the BISAC subject terms. And those are found down here. And you can learn more about the BISAC subject terms there. If you don't know what they are, don't worry about it. Focus on the FEMA ones. If you do know what they are and you're using it for bookstores, just know that we've updated the BISAC subjects to the newest set of terms. And if you're using, there's a few terms that they deprecated. If you're using the deprecated ones, we'll provide a friendly warning and we will try to update it automatically to the preferred term now. So you shouldn't notice any breaking changes, but that's just what we tried to do there. My thanks to Oscar and Ricardo in particular for working on this feature. It was a lot of behind the scenes work and hopefully it'll just feel like a seamless smooth change for you. And you can keep putting the relevant subject terms for your books there. The next thing I wanted to show is we had a bug. And it's a very particular bug, but if you had entered a PNG image, it's a particular type of image format, they can include transparent backgrounds. So here's an example of a PNG image that has a transparent background. It turns out that when you go into theme options and go to your ebook exports, there's a choice that you have to compress the image, which means that we'll use a smaller kind of version of the image that takes up less size and space for the ebook export, since you probably don't need the image to be full size in the ebook. Well, when we were compressing the images, the algorithm that we were using was actually inserting a black background for transparent PNGs, which was not great. So Oscar went and fixed this bug. So now if I were to compress the image, turn that on and make an ebook export, let me share my full screen so you can actually see this. Here I'm going to export the ebook. I've already done it in advance, but I would go ahead and click EPUB produce the export. And then I'll download this file and open it on my computer. Can everybody see the book there? You're seeing my web book. Let's go to this chapter and you'll notice that's legible. There's no black background from my SVG image. So a couple of people reported that bug. They were trying to get their ebooks to look just right and had been using that feature. Previously, the workaround was, well, don't resize the images. And now the answer is, yes, you can use PNG images with transparent backgrounds and we will resize them properly. So thank you, Oscar, for fixing that for people. We made a very small accessibility change, but it may make a difference for you depending on the kind of assistive technology that you use. I'm going to install a little plugin for my computer that will simulate what a screen reader would sound like. A screen reader is assistive technology that will read aloud, usually to an unsighted user, the content on their page. And they can use this to navigate their page. So on the Pressbooks My Catalog page, which is a kind of obscure page, but in the My Catalog page, you can search. So here I'm going to search for the word guide. So I'm going to perform my search. Sorry. There we go. That's what I was after. It will say search result guide returns six items. So what will happen for users of a screen reader is I'm not a very skilled screen reader user. So my apologies. But what I meant to show was you're going to see that a search result visually appears here, but there was no indicator for screen reader that that had been changed. And so now what we're doing is we're announcing to the user an unsighted user. When a search is performed on this page, we will now announce the search results for them through the screen reader so they can hear the results being read to them for their query. So that was a change that we made that should help unsighted users that are searching in the My Catalog page. Another change that I won't demo, it's kind of deep in the weeds, but there are different ways to encode images. Usually people will just upload an image file, but there's also a way of encoding an image that's called Base64, where your whole image is just represented as a very long string. If that you had a Base64 image in a XML file and tried to import it into pressbooks, we were trying to fix the Base64 image by adding a couldn't find this image, fix me. Now we're just leaving it alone and treating it as a Base64 image. So if you had a Base64 image in an XML file and we're importing it, we will no longer alter it, we'll just leave it as it is, so the image should work upon import. So those are some users from Switzerland that reported that to us, and we made a change. It wasn't exactly a bug, but we did make a change in our import routine. So that Base64 image strings are no longer being additionally processed by us, they're just being left alone. I also want to show you a few things that we fixed with our theming. So one of them is if you visit a book and you go into a book that has something called the details element, the details element is basically an enclosure, an accessible enclosure. It's an HTML element that you can use to, so for example here, the word the Hagia Sophia is a details element. And when you click on it, it can expand and will show you some hidden text. And in pressbooks we were actually suppressing this little carrot that shows you it's a details element. So we've restored that. So now when you have a details element, it will show this little expand contract carrot so you know that it's there by default. You can choose to style it even more or more differently if you like with custom CSS, but we put that details element visual cue back in there for people that are using that. Another change we made which is kind of minor, but you'll notice up here there's a similar kind of expand contract carrot that lets you expand contract the table of contents. Previously, if you clicked on the carrot itself, nothing happened. So we changed the behavior so that if you happen to click on the carrot, it will of course expand and contract so that it meets user expectations. You have to be really careful to get your mouse right on it to even experience it because it also works to click outside of it, but we fixed that bug. Another thing that we did was if you're using a keyboard to navigate, one of the options you'll see is this little skip to content link. I'm going to skip to content and you'll notice that my focus has just shifted to the main content and now I can tab through the main content. We made sure that focus shifts appropriately and that you're in the main body after you shift to skip to content. We had some JavaScript that was conflicting with that and we fixed it and made an accessibility improvement there. We also removed some unused JavaScript to kind of reduce the file size of the press release. Most people won't notice that, but if you do notice it, hopefully you appreciate that it's a bit leaner. The other things that I won't show it, we released a couple of new releases for our SAML SSO plugin with a couple of small bug fixes, the BISAC plugin with the subject heading things that I was showing you earlier and the LTI 1.3 tool that's used for connecting to an LMS and grade pass back. We made some minor improvements each of those. The next thing that I want to say that we've been working on, that we've been hard at work on, has been improvements to the press books directory. Many of you already know about the press books directory, but it's a site that you can go to search and find, open the license press books to adopt and adapt. We've been working hard on this. One of the things that we did was we asked a bunch of users to perform a UX survey and give us feedback about the various features and the usability. Some of the big features in the press books directory right now are a tour that Oscar built for us that will kind of take you through the various elements, how to use the search bar, how to filter and sort your results, how to use these facets to do more filtering. So this tour has been there and people told us what they liked and didn't like about it. And we also got general feedback about the design and the interface. So thank you everybody for participating in giving us feedback. We started to take that feedback and we're implementing it in a redesign of the directory. So our dev team is hard at work at that. I hope that we'll have a finished redesign to show next month, but for now I can show you a little bit of a sneak preview. We've been refactoring and redoing the underlying technology that we're using and the new press books directory will have kind of a refreshed interface that looks a bit more like this. We're going to be adding what we call featured collections. I think some of you have seen this before, but the idea would be I'll show you what it looks like in the staging environment now. You'd have a collection built around a given topic. So say open pedagogy. When you click the open pedagogy collection, it will show you all of the books that belong to that pre pre-formatted collection that we built. And so here would be some example of open pedagogy text. You can clear that and then you could come back and say, oh, I want to see all of the student authored books you have. And that would be another example of a collection we might build. So in the new directory, it'll have a similar interface here. We'll present five featured collections at any given time. And then we're going to clean up the search interface here and the facet sorting and filtering. We're building the facets right now. There's still a work in progress, but you'll see the facet interface has been made a little bit fresher and cleaner. And you'll see that you'll be able to do all the things that you used to be able to do, like filter your results. And you'll see some chips and cards that you can activate and clear. The book cards themselves have become a little bit cleaner. We're still working on this. And the recommended book will be kind of displayed with this little recommended box tab. So that's a sneak preview of what's coming. We hope to show you a fully functional version of this next month. Okay. So the major work that we're thinking about for the upcoming month is largely going to be this directory redesign that you're seeing a preview of. We really hope to have something to launch soon. We're also planning in the near future to launch a revamped version of the pressbooks.com marketing website. So you should be able to see a nice new design with some, some things there. If people are interested, I can show you it's coming soon. So let me just show you what that will look like. And you can get a sense for the new visual design here. The new marketing site will look a bit more like this. We really love the illustration style that the illustrator have been working on. And you'll see that it's a nice kind of simpler cleaner design for the website. And hopefully it will help people see and understand how they can find books in the directory and other kinds of things they're interested in there. So that's coming soon. That should be launched really soon. We've been working a bit on that. We've been working on the directory redesign. And we're also planning to begin a pilot this summer with a handful of chosen institutions that are going to start using that results for LMS feature, which is you can take pressbooks, you can bring them into your LMS, and you can treat each chapter as a graded activity. We've presented about this a few times in previous product updates, so I don't need to take too much time talking about it today. But we're going to be doing a summer pilot with four or five courses and real students and real instructors. And we're going to really hope to use that to understand what it is that instructors want and need from that product to help them teach effectively with open courseware. And we're pretty excited about learning from that and improving our product to meet teachers' needs. All right, so we just had a question from someone in the chat that asked, we have a book that's marked as private that they'd like to open up to others to do peer review. How can we share a private book for peer review? I would say there's probably a handful of options. One is, as you can see in the book itself, you can, of course, mark a book as private, and then only people with user accounts can see your book. So if you keep the book private, one option is to come to add users and bulk add. You can add anybody you want to be a reader or reviewer of this book, and you can give them the role that you want them to have in the book. Usually it would be subscriber or contributor if all you want them to do is read. If you want them to have authoring or editing roles, you can give them those roles as well. So that's the simplest option in terms of adding them into the interface to make edits and changes. There are situations or cases where you don't actually want them to edit the book, you just want them to read it and review it. What you would do is you would come into your editing interface, you make the book public, you come to the particular chapter you want to change with, you'd say show in web so it's public, and then you'd click the button that says require a password and enter the password of your choice. So you could password protect content temporarily and then just share the password with whoever you'd like to proofread. What's nice about this is that you could enter one password for this chapter and then we could come to this next chapter that I want someone else to proofread and I could enter a new password and I'd call this Ellen. And then I view this chapter and then if the user, let's say they're not logged in, they're just a regular visitor, they would type in Ellen on this chapter and then they could see the content for that particular chapter. When you're doing peer review, a nice thing that can be really valuable or helpful is using hypothesis for peer review and annotation. This is a plugin that's built into pressbooks and if you were to say select this paragraph, you'll notice you could then annotate this and you'll see in order to make an annotation, you need to sign in to the hypothesis service. So you can create a free hypothesis account and use it. It's open source software as well. I won't actually log in because I'm having problems with my screen sharing again, but you could then in hypothesis, you could make a private group and I won't demo that now. That would be another way that you could do peer review that's not visible to everyone but only visible to people in a group. There are other videos and good guides and recordings about that topic, but those are a couple of options that I would say could work. I wanted to thank everybody for coming to the April product update, appreciated your questions and your enthusiasm. We've updated the document here with some of the things that were shared in the community roundtable and we look forward to sharing you more product updates with you then again in May. Happy open textbook creation until then.