eBasta:School books to eBooks www.ebasta.in

Brief Description:

The Meity through Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has developed a framework "e-Basta" for making availability of school books from various publishers to schools in e-book format. This enables (i) publishers to upload the electronic content with relevant data, (ii) schools to search and collate e-content into e-Basta and (iii) students to download e-Basta contents (free as well as paid content) for use through an App on their tablet /PC.

In line with the government's Digital India initiative, eBasta project provides a framework to make the school books accessible in digital form as e-books. A portal is provided to bring the various publishers - free as well as commercial - and the schools together on one platform. In addition, a structure to facilitate organization and easy management of digital resources has also been made, an app that can be installed on the tablet is also available for navigating such a structure.

eBasta Portal

The web-based eBasta portal www.eBasta.in brings together three classes of stakeholders: the publishers, the schools, and the students, and provides them the following primary functionalities -

Publisher: Upload e-content along with meta data covering class, language, subject, price, preview pages, etc. Pre-publication content can also be uploaded for review; these will not be available for download. Publishers can also view comments and ratings by the users of the portal, as well as download statistics of various content. Where content is protected by specific DRM models, the framework would comply with the relevant restrictions.

Schools: Schools can access the portal to assemble resources as per their choice. They browse the eContent uploaded by various publishers, search for contents of their liking, and organize them into a hierarchical structure in the form of an eBasta. One can create an eBasta from scratch or by adding contents from existing eBasta. Every eBasta has a unique name, which can be given to the students so that they can download the eBasta on their own.

Students: Students visit the portal to download a prescribed eBasta or explore eBastas and contents available on the portal, and download those that they need. If the eBasta to be downloaded includes paid resources, they will have to complete the payment. Then they will be given access to download the eBasta. They will have to use the eBasta App to access the contents of the downloaded eBasta.

eBasta App

Students can access the basta using the eBasta App. The eBasta App renders it for easy navigation by the student. The content rendered by the app is as defined by the teacher/school in the eBasta structure, irrespective of filenames and the location of the actual files. The eBasta App, freely downloadable from the portal, runs on a Android device (version 3.0 or higher). The logo can be customized through the portal.

Main uses and domain :

• Publishers can publish their resources on the portal, for use by the schools
• Schools can browse, select and compile their choice of resources from this pool, as a basta for different classes.
• Students can then download such bastas from the portal, or the school may distribute them through media like SD cards.