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KitabiTukda – Own Less, Save More!

By Yash Roongta on 11 Comments / 4192 views

Hello Rodinhooders,

This is my second post after I wrote my debut Discussion.

So, today I am going to tell you about my startup KitabiTukda.

Let me start with a general problem first, I am a Bsc. Finance student at NMIMS, Mumbai. When I was in my first year, I had this economics professor Mrs. Anamika who asked the whole class to purchase this book by an author named “Gregory Mankiw”, well everybody did purchase this 800 Rs book.

Now the thing which happened at the end of semester was very common and usual, nobody ended up studying that whole book, some students just read two chapters, some just read one and some just kept it for showcase including me. I never actually read that book, this is when I realized, I wasted my good 800 Rs on a book which I did not read.

Well, this was the time, when I realized How Good it will be if I had the freedom to purchase this books in parts or chapter-wise. Now since I have already placed a very usual problem in front of you, let me tell you the solution to this but first lets meet the whole team behind it, because they come much above all of this.

Solution: This team created KitabiTukda. So at KitabiTukda you can purchase a college textbook in parts.Well, literally! Buy a complete book or rather only the chapters that you need. So your books fit right where your phone or tablet is.

Cutting to the chase, Kitabitukda Is a start-up that aims at augmenting digitization by providing e-textbooks which are cheaper than the conventional textbooks. One of the few to do so, they are the debutantes in one innovation that is bound to further reduce cost of educational material. The innovation is selling Textbooks chapter wise. The team at KitabiTukda has a very simple reason, they say “when you don’t pay for channels you don’t watch, why pay for chapters you don’t use”.

While we were working on this startup, we faced many unique issues, which I would like to mention here:

1. The ebooks industry in India is very niche, so many local or national level publishers in India do not have their books in the digitized format and this is a major barrier for keeping there books on our platform. The cost of conversion of physical books is too high for now.

2. Since, I am a normal PHP Coder, we needed to outsource this development to a Tech company, and this is a barrier to launch your business as soon as possible. When your work is outsourced, you really need to wait for the other side to get the work done. You cant do much accept falling at their feet to get the work done.

3. The ready to go market strategy and the factor to drive more users (especially students and teachers)

Right now, we are into Beta Phase Testing, You can register to have the Beta Version 🙂

We write some “Kickass Blogs” for College/School students. Check them here. I had be glad if someone would like to write for us. Just ping me at yash@kitabitukda.com

Would love to know the solution to the above problems and a feedback about the product which we are creating.

Questions? I had love to take it. I am following this post and will reply to all your queries. 

Yash Roongta

Twitter: yash_roongta

 

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11 Comments

  1. loved the name and the idea!!!

    way to go!!

  2. nice idea i am student from nmims as well what we do is we take xerox of those chapter if u can bring cost equal to less than xerox and money is also going to publisher then it can work one more problem chapter we took xerox of  are also usually marked with important tags so that will stop me from buying from u 

  3. Hi Yash,

    Have you got the permission of all the publishers & authors for putting their books on your platform? If not, will it not account to plagiarism?

    I have applied for beta testing. Looking forward to it.

    Puneet

  4. Oh Hey Sameer,

    Great that you are from NMIMS too, lets meetup someday.
    So right now, yes, we are working on a model with publishers which will bring down the cost of the books which almost equals to the cost of xerox.

    Also, there will be some basic features such as highlighting, taking notes within the app itself.

  5. Hi Puneet,

    Thanks for applying, will soon give you the access.
    To answer your question, yes we will be having only those books whose publishers have tied up with us.

    KitabiTukda is a marketplace, so these publishers will be registered as sellers, so they will have the copyright of all the books and material they host. So to say, we have tied up with some great publishers in the industry whose books will be hosted on our platform. In this way we do not have to account for plagiarism.

  6. Thanks Asha

  7. sure that will be great idea ,send me message i am running my startup as well

  8. Hi Yash its indeed an excellent idea. This part of the Education Marketplace is long due for disruption and you are indeed at a right place at the very right time 🙂 By the way I am an EduTech Consultant and active in this market for past ten years. Following are some of the insights I have for you.

    • There is a huge market for text books and reference books in India reading your post I am assuming that you are zeroing on the Higher Education market which is also equally huge. I believe the biggest challenge you would face or must already be facing is convincing the value of digitising the content of their books to Publishers 🙁 Somehow in my experience they run away from digital as they have a fear that once the content is digitised it can be easily copied and shared) 

    • Another major challenge is conversion of content as most of the publishers do not have digital content in true sense and therefore I agree with you that the cost of this conversion may prove to be a deterrent in the initial phase however there could be a solution for this I won’t elaborate more about that in fear of lengthening the post however once we connect I shall share my ideas about how you can convince these publishers to go digital.

    • I would like to know what kind of last mile device you have in mind to deliver these books, Is it a Tablet & Smartphone or and Web as well ? It makes sense to build content primarily for the smaller form factor considering students are moving from Desktops to Smartphones and tablets. If so you can think of using some open source rapid content authoring tools to digitise the content again I won’t detail all the stuff here but would be happy to assist you once we connect. These Rapid Content Authoring Tools are easy to use and you can easily outsource the content conversion work to the freelance communities in collaboration with the publishers.

    • Ideally digital book needs to be different from just a soft copy of the book, the last mile device like a Tablet or a Smartphone may offer lot of capabilities to interact with the content and therefore the digital version of any book can engage its reader in many better ways. I have some definite ideas about how you can integrate these capabilities and I shall share the same with you.

      • Just to give an example

      • there could be multiple tags created for students to share important points.

      • A part of book can also be highlighted by faculties to emphasise a particular part of the content.

      • You can attach external content such as Videos, Infographics, Animation, Graphics as hyperlinks so that the content would be streamed from cloud based servers and keep the book light on the device.

      • You can also create a discussion forum of students from the same division, class, institute so that they can collaborate on the book in real time.

    • You may also introduce renting of some books instead of selling them which makes more economic sense. As its a digital book it never would get worn out or torn off and you can easily remote wipe the content once the rent period is over. 

    So a lot can be done around your idea and business/revenue model. Lets connect and take this forward. It is indeed an exciting idea and its time has come. 

    My contact coordinates e Mail: me@mandarjoshi.com Mobile: 9890817339

  9. Thank you Mandar,

    For a beautiful insight on what all can be done with this venture. 
    Surely connecting with you after seeing your twitter handle “EduTechBaba”
    I really need a EdutechBaba to guide me on this journey now.

    Thanks 🙂

  10. yash – mandar is one of our earliest members and is a pillar rodinhooder. he is worth holding on to for advice!

  11. Hey Asha,

    Just realised that after having a small conversation with him.
    Scheduled a call with him to take this forward.

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