More Than 20 Arab Publishing Houses In Content Industry Contribute To 'Learnbook'

Amman - In an unprecedented step in the field of Arabic digital content development, more than 20 Arab publishing houses from Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait and Lebanon began enriching the content of "LearnBook - e-library", and feed the project with a huge number of books, references and scientific research papers. End Quote

(1888PressRelease) January 14, 2014 - In its first phase, the feeding process is aimed at the addition of more than 10,000 books and reference with content that covers the various subjects and disciplines in various fields of knowledge, to create a database that will be at the disposal of a huge network of universities, academic institutions, banks, and private and public institutions.

Commenting on the development, Mr. Hassan Ismail, LearnBook's board chairman said: "We are delighted to have taken the initiative and be the first to develop and implement the first and largest electronic library of its kind in the region and harness it to serve students, researchers and faculty members. I have been preoccupied with the idea of an electronic library for the past ten years - despite my devotion to paper libraries and long experience in the field. I realized during my work in this area that university libraries suffer from a problem of limited capacity, and that their content cannot be updated to keep pace with modern science. Consequently, students' horizons will remain limited as long as library contents remain limited."

He added: "But due to technological advancements and the new ability to overcome the problems of electronic publishing while protecting the rights of publishers and the authors, we were able to create a cohesive entity supported by several Arab publishing houses. It was designed to be the largest of its kind and the favorite reference for all academic institutions in the Middle East and North Africa."

Ismail explained said that the process of feeding "LearnBook" will not stop at the existing publishers. In fact, each publishing house that meets the requirements to join this alliance will be able to add all its stock of new high-quality research papers to the e-library, he said, adding that such an addition was until recently unavailable for students and did not exist in traditional libraries.

For his part, Mr. Ashraf Nairoukh, CEO of "LearnBook" said: "We will seek in the coming stage to include more publishing houses from other Arab and foreign countries, with the aim of enriching the e-library as much as possible with a wide variety of books and references. This e-library project is considered a qualitative leap in the field of digital education, especially as it features innovative interactive tools and multiple advantages that are lacking in existing and emerging e-electronic libraries, even in Western countries. "

Nairoukh stressed the importance of the project, which targets the educational institutions sector, and the need to develop and promote the Arabic scientific content industry and put this content at the disposal of students and researchers in various academic institutions. In this context, he pointed out the role this content plays in ensuring students access to huge amounts of major resources, research papers and references that have been hardly accessible before, let alone the provision of various scientific and literary books and other references, either original or translated to other languages, to utilize them to the fullest extent.

It is worth mentioning that the e-library features novel, innovative and interactive tools aimed to develop the teaching and learning processes in the region. One of these advantages is authors' access to the content to update their books continuously, with the possibility of publishing new products and adding them to the content. This is coupled with the system's ability to protect the intellectual property rights of the author and the publisher. Also among the e-library's advantages is that it curbs electronic plagiarism, thanks to an innovative protection system that prevents anyone from quoting any given book without attribution to the source. Besides, it has an inclusive search process that is not limited to the name of the book, the author or the title, but extends to every single word in the content of the book.

###

space

Other Related Press Releases