Aiming at making life of students simpler, Attano, the country’s first interactive education e-book store has launched ChapterBuy, where students can download individual chapters from books online.

An average college student’s academic life is filled with tracking down dozens of reference books that either cost too much or are not available. But according to Soumya Banerjee, CEO of Attano, the point of ChapterBuy is to help students sort through a mountain of reference books prescribed to them.

“Generally a college student is asked to buy one book in a particular subject and then is given a number of reference books they can either buy or take from the library. But often, libraries might run out of those specific books and students either have to find an older version that’s not updated or photocopy chapters from their friends’ books, which is illegal. Here they can download specific chapters and then peruse it at their own pace and time,” he says.

The best part is that the application also works on various platforms like Windows, Android or iOS.

“In order to make this possible we had tie-ups with 26 book publishers across the country to get content on various subjects in engineering, arts, management and commerce and currently we have about 10,000 chapters that one can buy,” he adds.

Chapters are priced from Rs4 with each chapter priced at 15% cent of the original books. “In case the student ends up thinking that he/she want the entire book, then he or she can buy it and would only be charged for the rest of books excluding the chapters already downloaded,” he says.

However the chapters once downloaded can’t be “cut copy pasted”, so to speak, says Banerjee.

“The chapters look and feel like how they would in a real book. These are not PDF versions and hence cannot be copied but this is great option to photocopying content,” he adds.