A book written in OpenPress is made up of parts and chapters. Parts are used to group chapters, and chapters contain the main content of the resource. Each Pressbook must have at lease one part (often titled “Main Body”).

Watch the video below:

For more information see Create and Edit Parts and Create and Edit Chapters in the Pressbooks User Guide.

Use parts and chapters to structure your resource

Parts and chapters will be used by Pressbooks to generate the table of contents for the resource. As such, when deciding how many parts and chapters to include in your resource, you want to come up with a combination that will make your resource easy to navigate without being overwhelming. What this looks like will mostly depend on the length of your resource.

For example, if your book is less than 100 pages, you could have one ‘Main Body” part and then a bunch of chapters. However, if your book is longer, you will likely want to use multiple parts to organize the chapters.

Note that although the Pressbooks platform uses the names “parts” and “chapters” you are welcome to label these sections whatever you like. For example, you could label parts as chapters and label chapters as chapter sections.

Explore the table of contents of these books to see how authors have used parts and chapters to structure the book:

• Canadian History: Post-Confederation – 2nd Edition
• Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition
• Key Concepts of Computer Studies
• BC Reads: Adult Literacy Fundamental English – Course Pack 1