FOR generations, students would begin their university term by handing over a big slice of their grant or loan cheque in return for a stack of textbooks.

But times have changed drastically. Just ask Kortext, the Bournemouth-based company which has become the UK’s leader in delivering university textbooks in electronic form.

And these are much more than conventional e-books. While students can annotate them, lecturers can analyse how the texts are being used and where an individual might need to put in more work.

“We have about 300,000 titles available from about 500 publishers now,” says CEO James Gray.

“We have a number of different arrangements with different universities. There are about 40 all over the UK that use Kortext for distributing and providing major textbooks to students.

“We’re growing at something like 300-plus per cent per year.”

Mr Gray launched the business in 2013. It helped that he had previously established Ringwood-based Coutts Information Services, which became a leading supplier to university libraries around the world.

Kortext provides the online platform through which the texts are delivered and has agreements with leading publishers such as Pearson, Cengage and Wiley. It employs 50 people, 30 of them in Bournemouth, and delivers texts to students across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

It recently expanded into offices at Avalon, the former McCarthy & Stone headquarters in Bournemouth, and created an ‘innovation lab’ to develop new products.

Recently, it entered into a global partnership with Microsoft to integrate its software into Office 365, which is used by more than 100 universities in the UK and thousands worldwide.

The upshot is that students and academics can easily access thousands of books on any device.

A separate partnership with Samsung led to 10,000 students at the University of East London being supplied with Samsung Galaxy Note tablets, with Kortext’s app and their textbooks already loaded.

And technology has done more than eliminate the need to carry heavy books around. Lecturers can now see how the students are studying – which passages they are looking at and where they might be having problems.

“Every lecturer gets a dashboard of all the students in their class and they can see their progress,” says Mr Gray.

While you might imagine that raising some qualms about privacy, he insists it can be hugely helpful. “If you can help a university show where students are struggling, that’s good,” he says.