Snapplify technology brings hundreds of thousands of ebooks to UNISA students
After securing a new investment to facilitate expansion, pan-African edtech company Snapplify formally announces that they, together with UNISA Enterprise, will be the joint ebook provider for the University of South Africa (UNISA). The partnership combines Snapplify’s award-winning tech innovations and broad geographic footprint with UNISA Enterprise’s commitment to distributing quality higher education resources. Now, nearly 400 000 UNISA students will have instant access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks and e-textbooks on mobile, tablet, or desktop devices.
UNISA is the largest distance-learning university in Africa and longest standing globally. In the past, the ordering, purchasing and delivery of physical textbooks has been a lengthy and complicated process for UNISA students, who are located across Africa and other parts of the globe. With Snapplify’s technology, purchasing e-textbooks via the UNISA ebook store is quick and convenient. UNISA students will now have instant access to prescribed e-textbooks and additional reading, without needing to deal with multiple providers, worrying about titles going out of stock, or waiting for books to be delivered.
As the largest ebook aggregator in Africa, Snapplify boasts an extensive catalogue of over 280 000 titles from leading local and international publishers – all of which will be available through the UNISA ebook store. This includes e-textbooks and other educational ebooks that cover a variety of tertiary subjects and study areas (including Engineering, Technology, Commerce, Humanities, Life Sciences, Physical Science, and Medical Sciences) from key academic publishers including Cengage, Elsevier, Wiley and Juta. In addition to these core academic ebooks, students will also be able to purchase leisure reading materials, including bestselling fiction and non-fiction, from the UNISA-branded store.
‘Snapplify has a long history of working to tackle education challenges and lower barriers to ebook access. We’re proud to be able to bring e-textbooks within reach of hundreds of thousands of distance-learning students, who may otherwise have struggled to obtain the resources they need to achieve academic success,’ said Snapplify’s Higher Education Account Manager Penny de la Plain.
‘Partnering with Snapplify is aligned with UNISA Enterprise’s strategies to grow and optimise the impact from its relationships with business and other innovation partners by capitalising on UNISA’s brand,’ explains UNISA Enterprise’s CEO, Tsabiso Letsoela.
‘Our role is to enable UNISA to bring new insights to business, industry and other innovation partners who, when working at scale, can project these around the world and catalyse new and transformative technology uptake, leading to completely new markets in which UNISA can engage, creating organisations and systems that will be receptive to UNISA’s ideas and people for the long term.’
Snapplify has won multiple global awards for its innovation in technology, including the FutureBook Innovation Award, the African Leadership Network Innovation Award, and the Education Award at the AppsAfrica.com Innovation Awards. Snapplify was also the recipient of two prestigious awards at the 2019 Reimagine Education Conference in San Francisco, and this year, Wesley Lynch, Snapplify’s CEO, was invited to be on the Reimagine Education’s international panel of judges for the 2020 Awards. In 2017, and again in 2019, Snapplify was recognised by the London Stock Exchange Group as one of their Companies to Inspire Africa – an honour that led to an invitation to speak with policy makers in New York at the United Nations headquarters in July 2019.
Email hello@snapplify.com to chat about your specific needs and how we can work together.
