Schools, colleges or universities can drastically cut costs and be environmentally friendly by offering students electronic textbooks, manuals and syllabi in HTML, CHM, PDF or EXE formats, on and off line. This package has the tools.

Pros: Most educational material today is paper based. However, there’s no reason these cannot be made electronic. In fact, going electronic can add value in adding a whole new dimension to the learning via multimedia material. Incidentally, if all educational material is published electronically and are distributed and circulated in that form, the institutes would help cut down paper consumption to a large extent.

Students can be offered textbooks, manuals and syllabi in electronic format such as HTML, CHM, PDF, EXE, RTF or some other custom format. These e-textbooks can be posted on the web, made available for download or handed out on CDs or DVDs.

A reader and an editor constitute the main modules of SunRav BookOffice. The Reader module is what students use to view electronic textbook with as relevant to the format used, some formats may not need a specific reader. The Editor module on the other hand is used by faculty or a specially trained author/instructional designer/content creator to create electronic material.

When creating e-manual from scratch, users can take advantage of the Editor module that has all word processing, text editing, spell-checking and OLE object supporting features. Inserting hyperlinks, images, graphs, charts and multimedia objects does not require any programming or HTML skills. One could import existing MS Office documents too. Once the material has been created one has the option of creating the output file in the required format including a paper print. The editor interface extends the familiar MS Word interface with easy to use and understand icons & menus.

Cons: The format war in electronic books is still on, no one format has won. This program introduces yet another format. Which can add to the confusion. Unless all educational material are available in a uniform presentation it’ll be difficult to have the changeover to electronic books universally.