Publisher Bookboon.com is offering free e-textbooks to South African tertiary students studying engineering, IT and finance.
“We want to make it possible for South African students to go through university without having to spend money on textbooks at all,” says Bookboon's COO, Thomas Buus Madsen.
The e-textbooks are available for download in PDF format, making them platform-independent - they can also be printed. Advertising, which is received from potential employers in the students' fields of study, covers the cost of the textbooks. The advertisers use this model to attract students to their organisations upon completion of their studies.
The books are written by professors across the world, and are relevant to all students in the designated fields of study. Professors from higher education institutions in SA evaluate and decide what teaching material is relevant to their curricula.
Bookboon presently provides nearly 800 e-textbooks. Last year, 11 million textbooks were downloaded worldwide - 140 000 of those were downloaded by South African students, according to Madsen.
The company expects 50 million downloads for 2012.
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