Filipino History in PDF eTextbook for 23 Million Students

This sounds farfetched but we would like to help 23 million Filipino Students (rich or poor) to have a Filipino History textbook in English in the amount of US$1,500. But yes, this can be done and the etextbook will be available for free. Yes, you read it correctly. For free!

I am Rommel Redondo Ortega (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rommel-ortega-814a6b38/) and I live in the Philippines.

And here is our story: When my daughter, Asia Camille, was in Senior High School, in a Private Catholic School, she needed textbooks to be able to study her lessons but the amount was staggering for me. Around Php6,000 - Php7,000 (US$127.66 - US$148.94) have to be shelled out to purchase the required textbooks for a single semester. Senior High School is a four semester course and if we compute the total amounts of money for the textbooks required for the four semesters then the sum would be around Php24,000 - Php28,000 (US$510.64 - US$595.75). They are very substantial amounts for Filipino families or for the Asian families for that matter. Unfortunately, I was out of job at that time and her mother has already paid the tuition fees (we're a broken family by the way) so I felt obliged to shoulder the costs of the textbooks. To make the story short, I was not able to finance the textbooks and it pained me then. 

It then came into my mind as to why textbooks are not free. Textbooks can be provided for free - I thought to myself thus this business model came to be planned.

We need the US$1,500 to buy the Author's Rights to his or her textbook, upload it online and make it available for free for everyone - in desktop or mobile versions.

We needed the fund in the first week of January 2021. Also, I would like to ask for your help in contacting Ms. Maria Ressa, the CEO of Rappler Philippines, so that we could present our proposal to her if we could embed the textbook/s in Rappler's website for downloading. We also would like a help from our Secretary of Education Mrs. Briones to guide us in the selection of textbook. And in the preparation of the textbook, we would like to acquire a help from Mr. Ambeth Ocampo, a historian in the Philippines, as consultant. Also, we would like to have Mr. Jos Ortega (not related) (CEO of Havas Ortega) as our consultant in the advertising or business side of the project (these are requests of help). 

We decided to have this as a for profit venture simply because we do not want it to be a single book project. We would like it to be sustainable for future students and other readers worldwide.

We would be happy if you could use the [Help by sharing] button to share about our project!

Thank you very much for the availability of this platform. More power and God bless.