Introduction

Many open textbooks are available online or in other digital formats. However, sometimes, students and instructors prefer to use a printed, bound textbook. This guide allows you to address three of David Wiley’s “5 R’s of openness” : retain, reuse, and redistribute.

This Print on Demand Guide provides information on the what, why, and how of creating your own hard copy textbook of any openly licensed textbook found in the BC Open Textbook collection. However, these same steps can be used to create a print on demand textbook from other collections providing you have access to the correct file types. 

In addition to cost to students, one of the biggest advantages of choosing an open textbook is it gives faculty and students the legal right to retain and make copies of the textbook without obtaining permission from the copyright holder. This is possible because the copyright holder has already granted permission by releasing their work using an open — or Creative Commons — license. This type of license gives users permission to use and reuse, share, copy, retain and modify the textbook without consulting the author.

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