Education NEWS: Ebook
By mahoni.com
Santoso Suratso Bsc. MBA
Solving Education Books in Indonesia with Mahoni Buku BSE (electronic school book).
How do you reach 50 million students and oveer 3 million teachers in archipelago of 17,000 islands? Indonesia government allocated over Rp.400 trilliun (about USD40 billion) a year for education, but as of right now, education books for K12 is still a major problem. There are many reasons, such as increasing paper cost, printing cost, packaging and handling cost, and so manu other costs involving getting a book to a student. But the biggest cost of all is ‘transportation’ cost. In many cases the printers are centralized only in big cities, therefore getting a book to isolated area can be more expensive than printing cost of the book. Many island need to be reached not just by car, but also by boat and then motorcyle and finally on foot.
Mahoni.com started evaluation of Indonesia situation and saw that the following data could be the way as solution to fix the school books problem.
I. Indonesia has a very good mobile penetration in the society
Mobile Penetration
https://wiki.smu.edu.sg/digitalmediaasia/Digital_Media_in_Indonesia
Indonesia has 62.7% mobile penetration rate, and is the 4th largest market for mobile users, trailing behind China, USA, and India. 48% of these users had used their mobile phone to access the Internet. This number is higher than Thailand (36%) and Singapore (35%) [10] The fact that most Indonesian uses their mobile phone to access the Internet is unique. While most developing countries progress gradually from no connection to adopting landlines and then to mobile devices, Indonesia has “leapfrog” and head straight to mobile phone as a way to access the Internet.
One of the main reasons of this is due to the fact that at US$ 1.93 per month for “unlimited plan”, Indonesia has one of the cheapest Internet package alongside the United Kingdom. Furthermore, mobile phone offering in Indonesia is getting much more cheaper and varied than before. The high number of usage of Internet through mobile phone has also propelled telecommunication providers, such as Telkomsel, to allocate more than 40% of its 2011 capital expenditure on the development of broadband during the first quarter of 2011.
Indonesia’s vastly growing mobile internet penetration, therefore, should force marketers worldwide to think about penetration not only with traditional media (where phone and TV are the priority choices in majority of emerging countries), but also develop applications and platforms that would support mobile internet users
Mahoni.com (PT. Mahoni Global) is the leader in mobile app developer in Indonesia decided to tap on this problem and leveraging the statistic above by introducing Buku BSE. Its an electronic ebook application which can be used for all mobile devices. This is an education ebook platform to support mobile internet users read over 2000+ local ebooks for education and necessity knowledge nationwide. In just one year, Mahoni Buku BSE grow over 1000%, with about 50,000 ebooks downloaded every day from bse.mahoni.com server. This is over 1.2 millions of ebooks downloaded per month from this platform.
We believe in 3 years we will have over 10,000,000 installed based users for mahoni buku bse, and it will be the largest community of students & teachers platform in Indonesia.