Making a difference in education
BookFusion’s first wave of activity is geared towards the local education sector. Last October, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with Minister of Education Ruel Reid, which allowed it to integrate the Ministry of Education’s Tablets in Schools Programme into its platform. So far, BookFusion has been able to digitise 70 texts under the Ministry of Education’s Doctor Bird and Blue Mahoe reading series for primary schools, and the Early Childhood and Literacy 1-2-3 series for basic schools. Students, teachers and parents across the island can now gain free access to the ministry’s entire digital library on the BookFusion platform, both online and offline on any device – desktop, smartphone or tablet. The next move is to add interactive elements to the relevant e-books, which will engage the students and enable them to learn certain key topics faster. “If you look at the ministries of education throughout the Caribbean and in Africa and other regions, with their digital strategies, they have to provide content, but also distribute. In previous programmes, they would have to recall all the tablets to a physical location in order to upload the content. Outside of that, they also had difficulties negotiating with publishers to get content to put on the tablets, since they had no secure way of distributing that content and restricting access.
What we do is provide them with a platform that allows them to reduce operational costs. Now they can push content to all tablets from a central dashboard, and we allow them to negotiate much more reasonable prices with publishers. For example, instead of having full licence for the book, they can negotiate using the book for a specified time, or just using particular chapters. What that does is reduce the spend that governments would have to make to pay for educational content for a year,” Dwayne explained.
BOON FOR AUTHORS
The platform also provides a boon for authors and publishers in the Caribbean and other emerging markets.
“If you look on Amazon, you will only see the physical books for sale most of the time. One of the reasons for this is because Amazon has such draconian terms. If an ebook sale occurs from the Caribbean, they take up to 70 per cent of the money and only 30 per cent goes back to the publisher,” Dwayne said. “Compared to our platform, we’re trying to give publishers and authors more control over their rights and their content, so we take only 25 per cent per e-book sold, regardless of where that sale occurs.”
“The company’s current focus on educational books is also a key part of its revenue model. When you look on the Caribbean region, the educational sector accounts for more than 70 per cent of the publishing industry. So we’re currently focused on those publishers so that we can build up a healthy revenue in order to allow us to support the other genres on our platform and have a much more balanced selection,” Dwayne said.
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