He is a final year student staying up nights to read borrowed books. I would afford them if I was not forced to buy all my children 10 textbooks at once. It is not fair on him..

Grace, mother in Machakos-Kenya

KYTABU - The textbook subscription app

KYTABU is a textbook leasing application for low cost tablets. Reducing the cost of a book by more than 60%, users can rent textbooks on an hourly, weekly, monthly, school term or annual plan.

Buy on iTunes Just $40 plus the tablet!!

Click
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and see how it works

What if everyone…

… had access to textbooks! Anything worth knowing is worth writing down and lots has been written. Textbook after textbook, edition after edition, author after author, ideas, concepts, stories, theories and facts have been poured onto paper world over. But how many have access and at what cost? Kytabu was created for access. Text-book access.

Here is a presentation of the initial concept on Vimeo.

Kytabu – Textbook Subscription from Tonee Ndungu on Vimeo.

In the last 100 years, more has changed in the world than in any other century before it. Everything from medicine to transport and architecture to knowledge has accelerated at a phenomenal pace. Technology has played a very big role in it, but has not been the back-bone of all the advancement. People have!

In all our achievements, education has been at the core of our advancement. Sadly, the manner in which it is delivered has predominantly stayed the same for 3000 years. Think about it. Flat screen Tv sets, 4D theaters, interactive media and artificial intelligence..yet we still learn the same way Pharaoh did. Odd!

No part of the world has a greater challenge and need for education than the developing world. Everything from food security and governance to health and social equity depend on it. Yet that education is stored in textbooks far from the reach of many average students. It simply makes no sense. Not to Us at least! So we built it..Kytabu.

Kytabu was built to solve the problem of access; textbook access.

Kytabu is a textbook subscription application built to create the cheapest and most widely used form of text book access to middle and low income families in the growing economies of the world starting with Africa.

The subscription application is initially being built for cheap android tablets such as the Indian Aakash tablet and others like it. The application would encrypt learning institution text books courtesy of publishers and use a credit based buying system than can be topped up using sms-based money transfer systems or normal credit/debit card purchases to allow users to ‘rent’ books daily, weekly, monthly, over a (school) term or annually to access a book on the [around] $50 tablet. The application also allows the subscription of pages and chapters of books instead of entire books only. This reduces the cost even further.

For more on the execution of the application, please go to The Specifics page, but that’s Kytabu in a nutshell! You can read through the rest of this site for more and you can find us on the social hook ups here too. To know more abut what we are up to and how far we have gone, follow us on twitter or RSS our blog (which is still a work in progress).

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700%

The increase in percentage in textbook costs over the last twelve years in Kenya i.e. it costs seven times more today! This takes inflation, living standards and currency valuation into consideration.

10 textbooks

The average number of books a student needs as a requirement to be admitted and participate successfully in class. Only 28% of primary school students in Kenya can [afford to] have all ten books.

46%

The decrease in percentage cost of text books on the digital platform. In some instances, the book would cost up to 76% less as a digital copy than as a hard copy! Talk about a bargain..!