Institut Teknologi Bandung

BANDUNG, itb.ac.id - Book is world firmament. We do repeatedly hear the password. Even not rare informed that the book is the science indicator, more and more books we read hence more knowledge we have. In short, book is science warehouse, most important medium to enhance quality of education. Nowadays, the book claimed to meet national education standard. But, practically the book as important matter in education is difficult to be reached. Even for elementary school levels, each student obliged to buy book at the price of hundreds of thousands rupiah. By the fact mentioned, National Education Department initiated to buy the textbook copyrights from publishers or writer then distributed freely in the form of electronic book (e-book) what is named Electronic School Books (BSE). In order to assist Depdiknas overspread the “science warehouse”, also to water down access to all teachers or student upon the collection, ITB provide site as place to download schoolbook file, reside in http://mirror.itb.ac.id/bse/pdf/. In the site, there are around 48 schoolbooks for SD, SMP, SMA, also SMK, in various subjects from Mathematics, Bahasa Indonesia, Natural Sciences and Social Science as well. File can be downloading in .zip format then it would turn into .pdf file format right after extracted. The electronic book is having various sizes around 2 till 20 MB. Teacher or student are entitled to download, print, copy, even sell the digital book available in the site, either in the form of CD/DVD or printed book as long as not exceed the highest retail price (HET), what is specified by Minister of National Education, and in certain condition apply. In mirror.itb.ac.id, addition of schoolbook collection will only be done after getting the book collection itself directly from Depdiknas, because in this case ITB only multiply what was provided from the government. Problem arises where some schools specify their own textbook which is the publisher different from what is there in BSE list. Therefore, students and parents remain depress due to higher education expense, though if only they could used the digital book as provided in BSE, parent can economize the expenditure till 25%. Besides, main problem is in some region we hard to find out well establish internet connection.