VIJAYAWADA: The Andhra Pradesh government has now made all school textbooks available in soft copy (PDF) format on the school education department's website for people to download and print them for their use.
As many as 371 e-books, 135 major and 218 minor, will be available.
However, these cannot be exploited for commercial purposes, said School Education Department Commissioner S Suresh Kumar on Wednesday "Today we are starting a new system. Besides printed books, all these text books will now be available in PDF format on the website," said Kumar.
Education Minister Botcha Satyanarayana today launched these e-books after releasing intermediate examination results.
Out of the 371, the Commissioner said 353 are available right now while the remaining 18 will be ready in a couple of days.
According to Kumar, these soft copies are an iteration or another step ahead of the QR codes printed on textbooks which also allow people to download the books in digital format on mobile phones or personal computers.
He said everybody, including private and public schools, are free to download and print the e-books but commercializing or modifying them into guidebooks is prohibited, which is unlawful and against the Copyright Act.
Meanwhile, Kumar noted that the education department is already freely distributing 4.8 crore textbooks to 42 lakh students from government schools and another 3.16 crore to 28 lakh students from private schools, which will now be supplemented by e-books.
Earlier, the Education Minister released intermediate examination results for the academic year 2022-23 in which 61 percent of the first-year students and 72 percent of the second-year students who appeared for examinations have passed.
More than 4.3 lakh students appeared for the first-year examinations and over 3.79 lakh appeared for the second-year examinations.
In both first-year and second year examinations, girls outshone boys, 65 percent girls cleared the exams to 58 percent boys in the first year and 75 percent girls to 68 percent boys in the second year.