More than 20 Arab publishing houses from Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait and Lebanon began enriching the content of “LearnBook – e-library”, and feeding the project with a huge number of books, references and scientific research papers.
In its first phase, the feeding process is aimed at the addition of more than 10,000 books and references. With content that covers various subjects and disciplines, the project aims 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, harnessing 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 realised during my work in this area that university libraries suffer from 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.”
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.
Mr. Ashraf Nairoukh, CEO of “LearnBook” stressed the importance of the project and the need to develop and promote the Arabic scientific content industry and put this content at the disposal of students and researchers. He emphasised the role this content plays in ensuring students access to huge amounts of major resources, research papers and references that previous had not been accessible.
The e-library features novel, innovative and interactive tools aimed at developing 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 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. In addition, 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.
