Jamaican Govt allocates $70m to put e-books on tablets

Government is to spend $70 million on e-books for on tablet computers currently being issued to several schools island wide. Minister of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, Phillip Paulwell, said the initiative forms part of efforts to reduce the amount of money spent by parents on textbooks for children.  The distribution of computer tablets comes under the Government’s $1.4 billion Tablets in Schools pilot programme.“What we have done in this phase is to purchase a lot of the content and a lot of it is externally driven and on Wednesday morning, we are going to be signing contracts for $70 million for e-books that will be placed on the tablets so that very soon, the youngsters won’t need to purchase textbooks at all; they will all be loaded on the tablets,” he said. MORE