Perlego, the digital platform that advocates for students, professionals and fights piracy
Perlego is a digital platform that is uniquely positioned to help recover sales lost to piracy from a large percentage of students (about 70%).
Perlego is a digital bookstore focused on the supply of academic, professional, and non-fiction e-books. It is a subscription service that offers users unlimited access to these texts for the duration of their subscription.
Perlego does not seek to compete with other publishers or platforms, but rather to fight piracy caused, for the most part, by the illegal dissemination of academic books or university readings.
Origins
The company was founded in 2016 by Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, both Belgian nationals, as a response to the growing inflation of textbook prices, although the first three years were spent building the platform. They were looking for a way to offer an affordable alternative to the high cost of buying university textbooks while helping publishers regain market share lost to piracy. Van Malderen, with an academic background in business and economics, had already founded two companies prior to Perlego, while Davis had extensive experience in software technology and website development.
Title gallery
Perlego’s content library currently contains more than 650,000 titles in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and German, covering more than 900 different disciplines, from aeronautics to zoology. Perlego currently works with more than 3,000 publishers that provide content to the service, including major academic publishers such as Wiley, Pearson, and Bloomsbury.
In this gallery of digital text works, we not only find specialized or academic books, but the platform offers the opportunity to search, among the almost seven hundred titles, the book that best suits both the reader’s needs and his or her preferences or desires.
The main beneficiaries of this plan are students, who barely have the economic solvency to purchase all the textbooks demanded by academies and universities. Moreover, they are not willing to buy the books requested by professors to read only a part of them, which is why they resort to piracy, which costs the publishing industry 200 million euros.
Perlego supports publishers by investing in CEO to steer users away from pirated internet platforms, so publishers have neither loss nor risk by being part of Perlego, but take a total of 65% of the profits from the registration and choice of their books on the web.
Subscription
With a single subscription, Perlego users have access to more than 3,000 publishers, which means a total of more than 700,000 titles in all types of disciplines. There are three types of subscriptions:
- The free trial
- A monthly billing subscription
- An annual subscription
