The Library is your catalogue of digital books: the course notes, past papers, readers and worksheets that live inside Ekati rather than on a shelf. Upload them once, decide which classes they are for, and every learner in those classes can open them from their own portal — on a phone, on a tablet, or on the one computer in the school office.

Two decisions make a book useful. The first is which classes it is for: leave the Levels field empty and the book is available to the whole school, or pick the classes it belongs to and only those learners see it. The second is whether it is free or paid: leave Payable unticked and every learner in the right class reads it at no cost, or tick it, set a Price, and the book becomes something a family buys from the Ekati store before they can open it.

Because a digital copy never runs out, lending is not a queue or a due date. One upload serves four hundred learners at once, which is why small schools with almost no library budget can still put a complete set of readers and past papers in the hands of every class.

Payable off means open to every learner in the right class

An unticked Payable flag means the book is part of your school’s offer. Learners see it marked Free, they press Open or Download / Read, and it costs the school nothing but bandwidth. Course notes, the school’s own past papers and a reading programme are normally free, and making them paid is a good way to make them unread.

Payable on puts the book in the store

Tick Payable and the book leaves the free shelf: learners see the price, press Buy now, and the purchase is taken to checkout like any other order. This is the honest mechanism for a commercial workbook or a paid revision pack — and the money behind it is counted with your other store revenue, not with your school fees, so it never disturbs the fee accounts.

Discount is the price the learner actually pays

The Discount column sets the reduced figure for a promotion. Set it and the learner sees that amount; leave it empty and the full Price applies. Change the discount, switch it back to the full price at the end of the campaign, and nothing about the catalogue itself has to be rebuilt.

Active is how you retire a book without deleting it

Untick Active and the book disappears from the library without being removed, so a learner who bought it keeps their access and your record of what they bought stays intact. Use it for an out-of-print edition you no longer want new families to order, and switch it back on when the new edition arrives.

They see two shelves

In their portal, a learner opens a school library that lists the books for their level and the general school library beside it. Search by title, author or course. A free book is marked Free; a paid one shows its price in XAF and a Buy now button.

Reading and downloading

Once a book is free — or has been bought — the learner presses Download / Read and works through it. A paid book that has not been bought stops at a short notice explaining that it must be added to the cart first, which is why marking the Payable flag correctly matters: it decides whether a learner meets a wall or a book.

What comes back to you

A purchase appears in Orders with the buyer, the book and the amount actually paid after any discount, and its money joins your store revenue rather than your fee income. Free books produce no order, so the honest measure of their use is not a sale figure but how many learners in the class have the school’s own past papers open on their phones instead of a shared exercise book.

Uploading a whole batch

Five years of past papers is not five separate afternoons. The Library table carries import and export controls: download the sample file, and it names every column the importer accepts — title, author, format, the course code, the levels and the description. Fill one row per book, leave the file paths empty if your import process attaches the files afterwards, and bring the catalogue in in one pass.