A company offering a Netflix-style subscription service for university textbooks has launched in the UK. Perlego offers users access to 200,000 textbooks for a subscription of £12 ($15.50) per month, or 50,000 public domain books with a free registration. It launched in 2013 with £500,000 of seed funding, and aims to capitalise on the demand for textbooks that are too expensive to buy or have limited availability in university libraries. Academic publishers signing up to the service hope to pull revenue from students who would not otherwise buy new textbooks.
A company offering a Netflix-style subscription service for university textbooks has launched in the UK. Perlego offers users access to 200,000 textbooks for a subscription of £12 ($15.50) per month, or 50,000 public domain books with a free registration. It launched in January with £500,000 of seed funding, and aims to capitalise on the demand for textbooks that are too expensive to buy or have limited availability in university libraries. Academic publishers signing up to the service hope to pull revenue from students who would not otherwise buy new textbooks.