Boopathy Kahathuduwa is a lawyer by profession and has been a Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) lecturer for over a decade now. He recently launched Wooks.lk, which is Sri Lanka’s first digital library for children.
Brunch caught up with him to learn more about it. 
On the topic of how and why Wook.lk was initiated, Kahathuduwa explained that during last year’s lockdown, they were brainstorming ways on how they could improve the learning of children and realised that one area that teachers were really struggling to do online was teaching small children. “Children from preschool to primary school were missing out a lot and there weren’t enough options even for parents to help their children.” At this point, they came to the conclusion that children needed digitised books. “It is that concept of digital books for children that brewed into a story book library at Wooks.lk. At the moment we have books for children aged three to eight, but we will soon be adding interactive picture books for two year olds as well.”
At Wooks.lk, their objective is simply to prevent kids from watching videos on YouTube and instead to develop a lifelong interest in books.
The website itself is pretty simple to navigate; anyone can go to www.wooks.lk and try the stories they are giving out for free. Kahathuduwa added that in order to access the entire library, one must subscribe to a membership. “We have three monthly subscriptions; Rs. 499 for Sinhala, Rs. 699 for English, and Rs. 999 for both Sinhala and English. When you subscribe, all books in that language will be made available to you.” But despite this, if any school requests them for their library, they will not hesitate to give it to them completely free of charge, Kahathuduwa added. “We are currently having a discussion with the relevant ministry to discuss this further.”
When asked what kinds of books children can find in their library, he informed us that they have story books, colouring books, interactive books, and educational books in both Sinhala and English languages. Wooks.lk is the only place where you can find digitalised Sinhala story books. Even the English story books are not popular western stories; they are all translations of the Sinhala books, which is a great way to bring exposure to our rich heritage and culture.
Another interesting feature that the website boasts of is, “all Wooks.lk books have an in-built read-aloud system where the storytellers read out the story”, so that children who find it difficult to focus on reading, or are visually impaired, can still enjoy the joy of reading. Voice is added to the audio books by elocution teachers to ensure that the words are pronounced accurately.
Kahathuduwa also informed us that all the interactive and educational books have been designed in a way that the child can interact with the characters in the book, making it a one-of-a-kind experience. Wooks interactive story books, is one of their own innovations, and was made so that the child is able to follow the instructions of the storyteller and interact with the characters in the story.
Every story book at Wooks.lk is checked by qualified preschool teachers and Sinhala and English language teachers. “We take all the steps possible to ensure that the highest quality product is given to children,” commented Kahathuduwa.
The biggest hurdle that they faced up to date is that since they are a fully virtual company, none of their staff members have met each other, so co-ordinating ideas from teachers to the designers to the engineering team in a fully online environment is a big challenge. In order to overcome this, they adopted various tools to track their progress and manage their teams online, and today it is running smoothly.
He also observed one major issue we have when comparing the Colombo children’s book publishing industry to the rest of the country; that there are no industry standards. “Anyone can write a story and put it out; except for a few well-known authors, we do not even know most of the authors. There are no established local brands for children’s story books either,” he commented, adding that not every story is not good for a child. “You must only give a story that is appropriate for their age. If you give something that is not age-appropriate, you hinder their development. You can cross compare a Sinhala book against an English book and identify these differences.” At Wooks.lk, all stories are reviewed by a teacher who has studied early childhood development and every book comes with a recommended age category so that parents know what is appropriate for their child.
As many parents these days are finding it challenging to get their children to study and read with online schooling, Kahathuduwa observed that Wooks.lk could help encourage children to read more. Commenting more on this, he said, “We do not know how long the present pandemic situation will last. If we do not help children to develop the habit of reading at the right age, it may become difficult for them to form this habit later on in their life.” Their educational books series which have fun activities in addition to just reading will help them to do such.
Talking about their main interest as a brand, Kahathuduwa stated: “We believe in helping every child learn the habit of reading. In line with that vision, we have decided to give Wooks books to all teachers free of charge.” They have already done a pilot project at Thurstan College, Colombo which was successful. Teachers at Thurstan were conducting weekly story reading sessions for children previously and Wooks.lk is now the technological partner for them.
Their next immediate plan is to add more educational books and interactive books. They are also working on getting Wooks books out in Tamil, therefore making it an entirely inclusive platform.
We were also informed that Wooks.lk has received quite a few offers from Sri Lankan publishers in Australia and the UK to promote Wooks books to Sri Lankans living in those countries, and they are currently working on this expansion project as well.
