4. Perlego

Perlego

Company: Perlego

Website: https://www.perlego.com/

Founder(s): Gauthier Van Malderen & Matthew Davis

 

Perlego Product Photo

 

About Perlego

 

Perlego is the world’s largest online subscription service for educational books and they are on a mission to make educational material more universally accessible and affordable.

For a small monthly fee, students have unlimited access to all the textbooks they need, exploring a range of topics across 900+ subjects. With built-in tools including one-click reference, highlighting and note taking, studying has never been easier. The books can be read anywhere on a smartphone, tablet or computer – users just have to simply search and filter to find the right book. Perlego is providing a solution for a broken and increasingly unsustainable academic publishing system that benefits all three major stakeholders.

Firstly, we have the students who are facing rising textbook prices, at roughly three times the rate of inflation over the past 50 years. This is clearly infeasible for many students so they turn to either the second-hand book market or academic piracy.

Which is where the publishers come in, the second major stakeholder, who have found that these alternative routes students use cannibalise as much as 30% of their revenues. We want to support publishers and bring an end to the piracy of textbooks.

Finally, we have the university libraries who in response to seeing reference requests drop steadily over recent years have turned to buying electronic resources. However, going straight to the publisher for these results in a model highly unfavourable to the universities.

Perlego is on a mission to build an inclusive product that’s accessible to all, whatever accessibility means to you.