The weight of your kid’s school bag will soon come down by many folds. Text books in the bag will make way for a tablet, saving children the trouble to carry heavy bags to schools.

Pressmart, which digitally publishes over 1,000 dailies and magazines for clients across the world, will launch a pilot in Hyderabad at an international school to test the model. After three months, students in the school will carry tablets, confining text books to their homes.

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The company has signed a deal with the 100-year-old La Salle Green Hills School at Manila in the Philippines to introduce Mobile Learning Classroom Application in their schools. “About 4,000 students from Grade 1 to Grade 12 will use the 8.9-inch Samsung tablets, replacing the text books. They have provided the content to be embedded with the tablets,” Mr Raghavan Madabhushi, Chief Executive Officer of Pressmart, said.

After the Philippines, the company is planning to take concept to India, Thailand and Malaysia.

In Manila, it would charge $100 a student for one year to access the content.

“We might go for a different pricing mechanism for schools in India,” he said.

A leader in digital competition, Pressmart now sees rough weather in the form of tough competition and economic slowdown. “We want to diversify our businesses and we thought this is the best way. We might offer the content over e-book selling sites such as Amazon. We have initiated talks with them,” he said.

Diversification

Later, the company would launch similar applications in life sciences. It made revenues of about $5 million last year. It expects the tablet learning initiative to drive its revenues this year up by $2.5 million this year.

>kurmanath@thehindu.co.in

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