Spotify for textbooks: Gauthier Van Malderen is revolutionising the traditional book shop

In 2016, when he was a graduate student, doing a masters in entrepreneurship at the Judge Institute in Cambridge, Gauthier Van Malderen had a eureka moment. He was listening to music on his phone using Spotify, and watching films on Netflix, but he was struggling to buy textbooks or find them in the library when he needed one. Surely, he thought, it must be possible to access books in the same way I access music, film or data? Easily and cheaply, anywhere, any time. But, he realised, there was no subscription service for books. Thus was born Perlego (Latin for “I read through” or “I scan”), the Spotify of textbooks. Van Malderen even went on to write his thesis on the subject, “Why the Old Textbook Model is Broken”.

There is a scandal, verging on a scam, in the realm of textbooks. Since 1982, the price of textbooks has risen at three times the rate of inflation. Some figures depict a tenfold increase. As if students didn’t have enough trouble already with tuition fees. They would be justified in feeling it’s a rip-off, up there with secondary ticketing for gigs and flights to Madrid when there’s a Champions League Cup Final on. Perlego aims to make learning accessible, without perhaps killing off libraries completely. “Students can still go to the library to study,” says its CEO and co-founder Van Malderen.

Gauthier Van Malderen, 26, was born in Belgium, lived in Henley-on-Thames as a kid, and was an undergraduate in economics and management at Bocconi University in Milan. His dad is in banking and his parents expected him to go into finance. “They nearly had a heart attack when I mentioned textbooks online.” They’ve swung around since. Van Malderen the younger is really responding to student need. When he was still an undergraduate he noticed that most students were using notepads so he set up a business producing very classy notepads, called Iconic Matter (“made by students for students”) with advertising from big companies at the bottom of the page, selling them in Belgium, Switzerland and Morocco. He made enough money out of that scheme to launch Perlego, together with backing from the founder of Zoopla, Alex Chesterman.

There are a couple of open access websites where you can download books for free, such as OpenStax, funded by Bill Gates – but it’s non-profit, and Van Malderen is on the side of writers as much as readers. “If you’re going to produce high quality work, then it would be nice to get paid.” Van Malderen is sympathetic towards professors. “They don’t want students to have to pay through the nose. They don’t ‘adopt’ textbooks anymore” (ie making them required reading). In the context of universities trying to open up access, the question of affordability becomes more crucial than ever.

The other possible avenue for impecunious students is, of course, theft, not so much nicking books from the library, more using piracy websites. Sitting at a laptop in his offices in Holborn, Gauthier showed me how he could illicitly download the pdf of a classic textbook, Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice, entirely for free. “No wonder publishers are having a hard time,” says van Malderen. “There is a vicious spiral effect. They lose 28 per cent to piracy, 30 per cent to second-hand sales.” In short, at present, publishers, authors, and students all end up feeling ripped off.

Apparently 88 per cent of students don’t see piracy as a crime. Van Malderen thinks legal can be cooler. “We can show them the convenience of having one space – a one-stop shop – where you can get all your books. And no one gets ripped off.” The average spend on textbooks in the UK is £439 (medicine will cost a lot more than English); in the US it’s $1,200. The cost of subscribing to Perlego is £12 a month.

Perlego also hosts all those public domain books, like The Odyssey and Das Kapital. “The culture has changed,” Van Malderen says. “It’s like music – you don’t want to own the book anymore.” Perlego is a streaming service. You don’t download, you read the book page by page online, on your phone if you like. It’s a “mobile-first learning experience”, as Van Malderen describes it. You can create your own library, like a playlist. And unlike the books in the university library, you can legitimately scribble in the margins and underline sentences, personalising the text.

You can become part of a network of readers, with input from other students, so you can compare notes, and get comments from professors too. It’s a virtual seminar that feels like it could make the real, traditional learning environment redundant. “We see ourselves as complementing rather than replacing traditional institutions,” says Van Malderen. “We’re just aiming to make learning more efficient.” It’s like reading, plus social media, where you can “follow” other readers if you like. There is potential for “lifelong learning” too. 25 per cent of Perlego subscribers are not students, but professionals (or would-be professionals) seeking to upgrade.

According to the aggregate data Perlego has collected, psychology is the biggest growth area in higher education, which is good for psychology professors and publishers to know. But the main intellectual advantage of the online system is that, whatever subject you’re studying, you can always dabble in something else – you’re not restricted to the books specified in your course. “For example,” says Van Malderen, “I was doing economics, but say I wanted to branch out into political science or philosophy, it’s right here”. It’s a whole online library rather than just a bunch of textbooks.

A declaration of interest: I teach at Cambridge. I know from personal experience that one thing that always drives students mad is how to put in references at the end of their essays. I’m not one for making recommendations, but I think the next time a student asks me how to do it (and I know it’s going to go wrong somehow), I might say, “Have you tried Perlego?”. All you have to do is skip to the references section, highlight, copy, then paste. Full marks. First-class.