Today it has announced a major collaboration agreement, which puts Amazon as the only company providing electronic books for all schools in the city of New York. This has been released WSJ who a few days ago we ahead that there was a project to make a migration to e-books in order to stop printing textbooks.
The New York City Department of Education has awarded a juicy contract of 30 million dollars to Amazon, to be responsible for providing electronic textbooks to its approximately 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools, this for the next three years.
Amazon with a focus on education
Thanks to this contract, part of investment to printing books will go to electronic formats, which will represent savings of close to 40% will be invested in infrastructure and in new digital devices for each school.
New York is considered the largest school district in the United States, and with this agreement want to push other states to adopt this model and reduce costs in printing books. This agreement will take effect from next 2016-2017 school year, and will have the option to extend for another two years with an additional investment of 34.5 million dollars.
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The objective of this contract is that Amazon is the supplier of all digital textbooks and other necessary contents in curricula at all levels in the state, but this does not include the hardware, i.e. Amazon will not provide any of their electronic readers.
These e-books will be available through an internal site of the Department of Education; will be compatible with a wide variety of devices, ranging from tablets, smartphones, laptops and desktops, as well as other readers who are not Amazon.
With this agreement, Amazon expands its presence to start with agreements at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the University of Purdue, which immerses himself in the education market, an important niche where there is currently several technology companies participating.
