Books and textbooks are central tools in our intellectual lives. While they are no longer alone in our media landscape, books maintain their critical place in our culture as the documentation of human knowledge and experience.

The Rebus Foundation builds new models and technology for open book publishing and reading on the web, to encourage deeper engagement, and to enable people (and machines) to use and build on books and reading in new and meaningful ways.

What We Are Doing

Our first focus is on Open Textbooks*. In partnership with universities, professors, students, and related institutions, we are developing an open and collaborative model for publishing Open Textbooks. We want to make it easier to publish great Open Textbooks.

In parallel with our work on Open Textbooks, we are members of the W3C, where we are helping develop a new vision for books that are native to the web. We want to help combine the older tradition of portable, bounded books with the pervasive accessibility, addressability, and interconnectedness of the Open Web. Our first focus in this area will be on scholarly deep reading.

Partners & Supporters

The Rebus Foundation is funded by the Hewlett Foundation, leaders in supporting Open Education initiatives.

Our research on web-based scholarly deep reading is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Learn more

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