Chennai: Standing in the hot sun and photo copying reams of reference material from a hole-in-the-wall copier shop may soon vanish for college goers in India. The Mumbaibased Attano’s newest service ChapterBuy has decided to sell individual chapters in e-book format. The fight is “directly with photocopier machines”, its founder Soumya Banerjee said.
At most higher education institutions in the country, it is a common practice by professors to direct students to read only certain chapters from essential books. This is more pronounced in engineering and management colleges where a number of reference books are prescribed. Instead of buying so many books students either go to library or photocopy the relevant portions.
Attano will digitize one book in under three hours on average and put the individual chapters on sale on various platforms—Windows on desktop and Android/iOS on mobiles and tablets. The price of each chapter varies from Rs 3 to Rs 1,146—currently the costliest offering in the catalogue. “The average price is Rs 25 and many a times, it will be cheaper than photocopy on a per page basis,” said Banerjee. “If you like the chapter, you can buy the entire book and the price of this one chapter will be deducted.” This, he says, counters the claim that such a service would dissuade buyers from buying full books. Not only will such a service provide you chapters sitting at the luxury of your house, it also ensures that there are no copyright violations.
The service comes at a time when a consortium of publishers that include Oxford and Cambridge has filed a suit against Rameshwari Photocopy Services, based out of Delhi University for copyright infringement and creating illegal copies. “All chapters have digital rights management (DRM) protection and can only be used on three devices simultaneously. Any further copies you make won’t work. It also has Geo-IP protection so that international users can’t use editions meant for developing countries etc,” said Banerjee.
At the launch, three publishers are going live on the platform including Pearson and the catalogue will contain 900 e-books and 10,000 chapters. Totally, 26 publishers are on board. The focus is on higher education as they are the heavy users of photocopying and “the ones with a device”. “This is another form of a distribution/reseller arrangement wherein a commission is paid on every book sold,” K Srinivas, vice president, higher education, Pearson said. In this model, companies like Attano double up as both distributors and retailers and therefore provide for more transparent monitoring of sales by publishers
Source |Times of India | 5 June 2013
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