[satyana]

Education in Indonesia:
Living In New World, Using Old Technology?
By Santoso Suratso BSc., MBA / Mahoni.com



Look at the picture above, what do you think? Look at everywhere around you, do you see people are using tablet and smartphone? I see out of 10 people may be 5 are using smartphones and 1 using tablet, not just in office but almost everywhere I go, in the shopping mall, in the airport, and coffee shops.

In one of the best selling book "Only the Paranoid Survive" ~ by Andy Groove/Ex Intel CEO, he said there are times of "Strategic Inflection Change", this is when the mass of people leaving old way of doing something and start adopting new way to do it.

I have been to these changes twice in my life, once during the conversion of manual setting in printing do desktop publishing driven by Apple Macintosh, and the second is during transformation from film photography to digital photography. I was the director for Kodak distributor in Indonesia for 13 years and I saw how one large industry of "cuci cetak - photo develop and print" destroyed and gone in just that period, from billion dollars to none.

Do I have the same feeling now? I don't know for sure, but It's very possible. This time is the destruction of printed media being transformed to digital media.

Let's look at what we have done, in 2014 January, we launched Mahoni Buku BSE for Android. BSE stands for electronic school book - its an ebook. In just 12 months the app downloads grows 1000% from almost nothing to over 50,000 ebooks download per day. Thats about 1,5 million ebook per month, with about 200+ GB of bandwith per day, amazing.

We are serving students and teachers from coast to coast in Indonesia or as local people say it "dari sabang sampai merauke". As of this writing we have thousands of thank you emails, notes, and spectacular reviews (4,5 stars) from over 4000 reviewers! And all that just in 9 months.

One particular testimony that we received about a girl who were rather poor, she had to study in bookstore until store closing because she could not afford buying the school text books. All this changed when she discovered mahoni buku bse, using her mom cheap smart android phone (less than $50 dollar). She downloaded all free ebooks from our server math ebook, physic, history, english, etc. studied them from the 4? screen smartphone and became a champion in ther village. We are very happy she send us photo of her grades.

This could be a start of something new going into the big storm of transformation in this paper printing industry. The change is here and now, we are living in new era where people behaviour has changed, they read, they buy and they play from their smartphone and tablet. I believe we should give them ebooks to their devices, not in printed paper. We live in 21st century and printed paper book was 20th century products.

What do you think? Send your feedback to info@mahoni.com