eBasta – School Books to eBooks

  • Name of Project: eBasta – School Books to eBooks
  • Funded by: Ministry of Electronics and Information Technnology (MeitY)
  • Period: Mar 2015-Mar 2018
  • Brief Description:  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. The project is conceived to lessen the burden of school books to the student, enable the schools and teachers to overcome the logistic problems of book publishing, transport and delivery, especially at remote locations, and significantly shorten the cycle of book content editing/changes which today is limited to a yearly cycle at best.

The web based eBasta portal http://www.ebasta.in , brings together three categories of stakeholders: the publisher, the school and the student. Publishers can upload e-Content along with the meta-data covering class, language, subject, price, preview pages, etc. Schools can access the portal to compile resources as per their choice into a hierarchical structure in the form of an eBasta. Students come to 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 be taken to payment portal to complete the payment.

The eBasta App can access the basta created using the portal framework, and 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, Google Play Store and Mobile Seva Appstore, runs on any Android device.

  • Key Features:
    1. Brings together Schools, Publishers and Students/Parents on one platform
    2. Facilitate schools/teachers to create an electronic version of “basta” of their choice consisting of good books, other econtents like audio, simulation,etc, from a much wider collection of resources.
    3. Reduces the burden of school text books in bag by making these available as eBooks accessible on a tablet.  
    4. Facilitates adding richer contents (audio, video, animation) to a Basta apart from textbooks and reference books, for regular study.
    5. eBasta App renders the eBasta as per the structure defined by teacher, irrespective of filenames and the location of actual files. This provides a uniform view of the resources in a class, to facilitate reference and access.
  • Screenshots:  

Figure 1 eBasta Portal (www.ebasta.in)

Figure 2 eBasta App

  • Current Status

The development of portal has been completed and is operational at http://www.ebasta.in. Payment for paid content is made operational through http://paygov.in. Currently, 2289 books [1956 pdf + 307 ePub + 25 mp4] have been published on the portal by CBSE, State Boards and Private Publishers. eBasta App is available for download from Google Play Store and Mobile Seva App store. eBasta Windows Phone App is available for free download from Windows Store. eBasta Desktop App – Windows & Linux is also available for download from eBasta Portal now. Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions providers like Adobe, Cygnet, Ulektz have shown interest to provide DRM solutions for paid eContents on eBasta. Proof of concept (POC) is completed for cygnet and ulektz DRM providers. After testing by CDAC & DRM providers’ team., this has been integrated in live server. Workshop series for creating awareness about eBasta has been started (included along with trainings done as a part of Rollout of Online Labs project). Total of 98 workshops have been conducted, training over 3225+ number of teachers from 1329+ schools on technologies including ebasta.