Each school will have unlimited access to over 76,000 eBooks that can be checked out, even by multiple students at a time. A digital library is much more economical to maintain, as it does not require staff, physical space or maintenance, eBooks last forever and are automatically ‘returned’ – saving on admin issues.
The company has shown a dedication to providing realistic solutions to African schools for combatting illiteracy and promoting leisure reading among the youth with its launch of the Engage solution and the SnappBox distribution hardware. Both solutions have been designed to operate in South African schools across the board, with SnappBox having won a prestigious publishing award at the FutureBook conference for its social innovation.
FutureBook Judge Joe Lennon, CTO of ePubDirect, stated, “We were impressed by Snapplify on many levels – the importance of the problems it is solving, the technology it is building to do so and the elegance of how it delivers content where bandwidth is limited or not available at all.”
The SnappBox enables schools to save over R600,000 on average in bandwidth, by providing a local server from which the eBooks are accessed using the school’s own intranet – using no external internet, saving them bandwidth and making downloading books to their devices instant.
The digital library features content for all ages, including fiction titles such as Jungle Book and Moby Dick, as well as poetry and classical texts by William Shakespeare and more. Teachers are able to draw on hundreds of author’s titles to complement their lessons and prescribe supplementary reading to their students so that the learning does not stop at school.
Schools are encouraged to grow their library by purchasing additional eBooks from the company’s catalogue of over 100,000 titles from over 250 publishers including Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Maskew Miller Longman, Oxford University Press, and Pearson. These titles include all the textbooks to fulfil their curriculum needs in every year of their schooling.
