The National Association of Publishers of Books and Educational Content (ANELE) launches a platform that facilitates the creation of libraries and digital backpacks. This is the ANELE Neutral Point, and it brings together the entire catalog of digital educational content of the associated publishers (90% of the Spanish ones).
It's about facilitating the choice and creation of libraries and digital backpacks; and as a more ambitious objective: the Neutral Point intends to agglutinate and present the entire existing digital offer at any time, and organize it so that it can be accessible to the entire school community. The technology that supports it guarantees maximum neutrality, flexibility and interconnection, both technical and functional. It allows to adapt to the diversity of devices, to the current distribution mechanisms, with the greatest independence of the telecommunications services available. The systems developed by the technological partners of ANELE guarantee a transparent and efficient management of the acquisition and use of the various digital contents, safeguarding the rights of authors, publishers, parents and students, without any monetization or added costs.
Its contents can be located by publishing house, by autonomous community and even allows access to the list of books chosen by each school. In this way, teachers and centers will be able to access all the contents, view the demos of the books and proceed to their choice and to the elaboration of the list of prescribed or recommended products to create the students' digital backpack.
Already a year ago ANELE requested the Government to promote the creation of a unique platform for access to quality digital content, which will allow the implementation of a hybrid model (content in physical and digital support) for teaching. But in any case it was necessary facilitate accessibility to an offer of educational content that already exceeds 3000 references, which will be useful for both teachers and parents.
The president of the association said yesterday during the presentation of the Neutral Point that "the technological evolution that has occurred requires that contents are multi-device and multi-support, and capable of working with very limited telecommunications. The Neutral Point facilitates it because it makes this type of content available to the School Community compatible with the diversity of existing and developing platforms. What we do from ANELE is to provide all these platforms with access to the full range of digital content developed by educational publishers. "
This digital catalog will be updated continuously, and can be accessed from PC, tablet, and soon also through an App for smartphones. Nowadays the entire digital content offer will be collected of the companies associated to ANELE, and it is also offered to other publishers.
Finally, it should be noted that, although the edition of digital books in Spain has grown little compared to other countries, in 2013 it has been observed that constitutes more than 10% of the books for teaching. So it was time to provide a place where all those contents were collected, and I hope it will be a lasting resource over time.
