Arabnet Arabnet

Vijua, the leading Egyptian company, specialized in interactive ebooks, launched the Kotobee app that allows subscribers to create interactive ebooks with educational tools.

Using Kotobee, an educational institution can create interactive ebooks with educational tools for readers, by converting PDF files to interactive ebooks for multiple platforms, including Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and files from the internet. The app enables users to perform several editorial processes, such as adding visual effects, replacing paragraphs, etc. It is available in 6 languages: English, Arabic, Spanish, French, Turkish and Portuguese. The app comes with an exciting feature: ready-to-use designs that include 3D modeling, interactive animation and customized designs; thanks to customizable templates. After previewing each page, the book can be exported to multiple formats suitable for iOS, Android, desktop and web. Users may add audio files, regular and changeable pictures (when you enlarge them). Users can also add zooming capability, create virtual reality and use digital formulas. Book designers can include, in their books, presentations, photo galleries and applets, whereas readers can add notes and bookmarks, and search within books, making reading educational books a fun, easy experience.

“There are three factors that make Kotobee Publisher stand out from similar apps,” said Aiman Abdulrahman, the managing director at Vijua. “Using Kotobee, you can design your ebook once using one source, and then export it to various platforms (web, desktop, android and iOS). The Interactive components within the pages are consistent across all platforms. And above all, ‘Kotobee’ is the only interactive ebook authoring tool that supports Arabic.”

According to Abdulrahman, the idea came to them after “working on ebooks for a long time, but in the publishing/marketing/corporate sector rather than education. Our previous product was named BookBake. BookBake was born after realizing the need of many Arabic companies to create ebooks themselves easily. We decided in mid-2013 to tweak our product to be targeted towards education after not doing so well with the latter. There is an active digitization trend now in Arab education and we found the opportunity to target the ‘ebook’ part of this digitization trend.” The transformation, however, wasn’t without problems. But Abdulrahman says that the problems were “mainly technical issues related to Arabic language, maintaining consistency across all platforms (web, desktop, Android, iOS), and issues related to compiling.
We are still in the process of marketing our product and we would not call that a problem since we believe it would take time.”

When we asked about lessons they learned in the journey towards entrepreneurship, he said: “After several projects, we are convinced that we should never rush with launching a product, but to take the time to make a ‘full’ product, with a complete feature list to be revealed during the genuine period of launch, as well as basic marketing content (e.g. video trailer, complete website, etc.). Partially launching and then announcing later on further features is not very effective. Also, we learned not to be greedy and provide some sort of free version (or trial) that people can use and create something real out of it, instead of jumping into the pool without knowing the water temperature.”

Other than those lessons, some factors played an important part in their success. “Simply persistence,” explained Abdulrahman, as well as “A sponsorship by the UNDP, through the Ministry of Telecommunications in Egypt. They awarded us to help to push forward the making of Kotobee, and have a real alternative to iBooks Author, but for Android.”

We also asked about the way they monetize and their targeted markets, to which he answered: “We sell subscriptions to institutes and building custom ebook/library platforms for companies. Our targeted markets are educational institutions, i.e. schools, universities and training centers.”

Finally, we asked the managing director to tell us about the big milestones in the future of their project. “Future milestones include adding more interactive tools to allow students to answer questions, solve quizzes and exams inside the ebook, and make these activities social such that results would be sent to the instructor,” Abdulrahman said. “We are also building an ebook library infrastructure that we can offer to institutes, to give them a ready-made online bookstore (website and mobile app) that they can use to distribute their own interactive ebooks to their students in an easy seamless way.”