People, Passions & Projects #6: Edzuki

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JS = Jinal
JT = John

JS: Welcome to the series of People, Passions & Projects! How have you been?

JT: Yeah good thanks, spent my time over summer on an internship trying to broaden my interest in research and looking at what other fields/industries are growing and how they're transitioning.

JS: So you were based in Cambridge over summer right?

JT: Yeah, because my internship was in Cambridge, I've had the perk of living in college throughout summer, which was nice to take a step back from academia. As we both know, studying can be very 'stuck in a bubble', so having the chance to experience a town or city from a different perspective is refreshing and also develops you in other ways.

JS: So today we're going to be talking about Edzuki, so firstly talk me through the name Edzuki, how did you come up with that?

JT: It was actually a funny story where there was a friend of mine called Tino, and we both went through a transition where we were looking for names, and when you look for a name you want it to be a name that is not rude, something clever that feeds into your mission. And so what we wanted was a name that could capture that. So initially we chose the name Adzuki with an 'A'  (our current name is Edzuki with an 'E'). Adzuki is a type of bean, and it represents the fact that all things great start from something small and this we wanted to show that from conceptual point of view education is all about development and the growing of a person. It was the perfect metaphor for it. The reason we changed the 'A' to an 'E' was that we wanted to do something online, so the use of 'E' has connotations of e-services etc. But also the fact that education starts with an 'E'. It's pretty basic when you look at it, but I think the name took a while to get used to, as not often do you have a 'z' in the middle of the word, but it stuck with us and will probably stick with us for the rest of the time.

JS: That's a really interesting, clever name. What's the main mission behind Edzuki, what's your key aim here?

JT: When we started out, we knew that education will change in the next 10-20 years, and something about the landscape will lead to a more open online vision, where education is something to be done remotely (which has become more topical since the pandemic), but also creating some sort of platform which allows people to establish dialogues and to talk to people from different cultures and societies. We think education isn't just about knowledge or information, it's about learning from other people , from their own existential backgrounds and seeing how that feeds into your own story as an individual. So when we started the early version of Edzuki it was mainly based on the fact that content creators could share the content they create with students and teachers, and we have this platform that links all these different actors together to share this information, knowledge and content, but also the lives behind people. So that was the main concept behind Edzuki.

But as I started university and started thinking more about where we want to position Edzuki, it felt as if the trend towards online education in terms of it being a true and whole experience rather than logging into a platform and seeing what other people do (I think that's a very low engaging level of education), and so our main aim in the long term is to create this full, whole experience where people can have these education profiles of them throughout their lives and it's something that people can actively engage with.

But right now we're trying to solve another issue too. Imagine Edzuki as an umbrella hub for different initiatives, and the current problem we are working on is to do with academic publishing, which is in itself is a tremendous and often overlooked problem. The problem is ideally that a lot of the text materials, journals, books etc., we as students and researchers use are inaccessible to not only us, but to the wider public. So the way we are positioning Edzuki is to democratise the price [of material], but also the way academia works. So it's mainly revolving around having books within the humanities, social sciences and sciences and bringing the price down from over £100 to less than £10. But there's a lot of obstacles and challenges with that, as you not only have the financial obstacles, but also the symbolic and cultural way that academia works. Trying to solve it takes a lot of understanding on what the current academic publishing has been like, and how it will evolve and why it's like that. A lot of the time I'm researching, seeing how the industry is working.

JS: So do you see yourselves as the ones to initiate that evolution to a new academic world, or are you studying how the evolution is taking place and seeing how you can improve it?

JT: I think it's a mix of both. For the past year I've had this idea, and I think the best way to test an idea is to talk to people about it. And when you start talking to people you find that they: either have the same idea as you but haven't really thought about it, or they don't. And so when I started talking to fellow mates on my course or university, it was that they had the problem, but they didn't articulate the problem or attempt to solve it. The reasons for this were that you never really think about it as a student, it's something in your subconscious, where you know it's a problem but the university still pays you for having it, so only when you take the decision to purchase a book, then you start to think about 'why does it cost so much for me?'. But because there is no easy solution around it, people just forget about it. There might just be a temporary reoccurring problem, but as a student you feel hopeless as it's not your job to care about coming up with a solution.

And as I said, as the industry itself has so many moving parts, I took the past year to research the best way to enter the market, what current companies are doing in the industry, and where does Edzuki lie in that and what can we do to approach the problem.

JS: I know you mentioned that you wanted to drop the price of academic books, how do you justify cutting down that much cost, dropping from over £100 to less than £10?

JT: It's a very good question, as normally the easy answer is that you'll just take a hit on profits, however they way it works and the reason why books and articles are priced as such is because the publishing companies tend to sell to institutions rather than students themselves. This is because they know that institutions will year-on-year continue to purchase the materials that they publish, and so when you're faced with that inelastic demand, you tend to walk towards that market. And so the market of students is actually overlooked by publishing companies. They might assume that because we are students, we have access to the institution we then have access to the texts, and so we aren't decision makers when it comes to purchasing the books directly. But if you think about it, throughout our year in studying, we sometimes come across a situation where we think 'you know, I may need to get the hard copy of the book', and if you make that process easier for students, I think that would encourage more students to purchase it. The reason why you have institutions charging £100, it is because there are far less institutions than students, and so if you visualise a situation where you either sell fewer copies at a higher price, or more copies at a lower price, then you could technically have the same revenue. We still think that there's no reason for the price to be that high if you're selling it at a student level, and that's what we're trying to get at.

JS: Edzuki wasn't your first development on the web was it? There was something called CoverShr?

JT: Yeah so back in the day, when we were both at the start of Sixth Form, I felt that people wanted to start exploring their interests, both related and not related to academia, so at the end of Year 11 I was messing about with web development and programming. It can be quite tiring trying to set up your own website, so I thought ' what if there was a way for students to put yourself out there onto the online world without having to learn the whole process of programming and creating a website?' (not that it's not useful to learn those skills, it's very useful!). But if you had a centralised platform where you could interest with other students and blog about your interests, it would improve viewership and dialogue, and so CoverShr was this idea where if you had a lot of students coming together to blog, it would create these topics of discussion, that would be discussed when you came into school the next day, for example. It was refreshing to see that people actually cared about the motivations behind their subject choices. But yeah, that was the very start of me immersing myself into projects.

JS: Would you say the experience you had with CoverShr, did it help you when you were trying to develop Edzuki?

JT: I think it helped me a lot, as it [CoverShr] was the first main project I was working on, so you learn a lot as you try to grow and develop. What I really learnt was to put yourself out there and ask lots of questions, because when I was trying to grow CoverShr I would reach out to other bloggers or people that I was interested in, and everytime I wrote something or a friend wrote something I would tell them, as it was related to what they wrote about. This helped grow CoverShr up as you had people with more developed blogs looking at it and marketing it to their audience. So one of the main lessons I learnt was to not be afraid to reach out to people who have similar interests to you, as they can often guide you what and what-not to do. You get to know people and talk about what you're interested in.

Another lesson I learnt was about giving people responsibility. Because that was the first main project, the logistics behind it were about creating this succinct and concise timetable where different people would blog, and seeing where people could work together on different blogs and arranging gust bloggers too. During that time I was also interested in product development, so I learnt a lot of lessons when it came to designing different things and to keep user experiences elegant and simple. Make it simple, as people understand clarity.

JS: And for those who are not really clued up with web development or product design, how easy would you say it is for a complete beginner/novice to get into it?

JT: It's really easy nowadays, especially with the proliferation of courses. Back then, around 2016/17, what I used was YouTube tutorials, pretty basic but it did the job you know. Online courses were around back then, but they weren't as hyped up or prominent. Nowadays, people have so much material at their fingertips, so the hard decision is choosing where to start, rather than having the resources to start. You have so much information, you understanding what you want to do with the information you have, what you want to develop, is far more important. We live in a sea of information, so what matters most is knowing what you want and what you want to build.

JS: We've talked a bit about your project, we're now going to go to more the passion side. So with you and Edzuki alongside your co-founder, what drives you to keep working on it, day in day out?

JT: The reason why we care so much about this problem is the fact that academic publishing is seen as something in the background, and it's not a topic that people understand much about, although people should understand. If we increase the access and awareness of people, in terms of knowing that they don't have to purchase a book for £60-80, and having the seamless process of purchasing a book, that's what keeps us going. Education is more than just knowledge and information as I've said, it's developing in a way that exposes them to the broad horizons of the human condition. What we want to try to do is to allow people to have access to those horizons through these materials and books whenever they want. When we look at books, they aren't just static, material items that we carry around, they are reading experiences that we engage in, that shape the dialogues and even the worlds we're in. If you have that reason behind you, it's what really is motivating us. We want to make these books beautiful in terms of design, and great to have, but also the longer term vision of making education more than a tool of transition but more of what it means to be human, a question that philosophically I'm very interested in.

JS: I know you said your longer term goal was to create this more accessible world of journals and papers. Because it's such a long term goal, do you ever find it hard to find the reason and purpose to what you're doing?

JT: I think that's a really good question, as often people care more about the vision but then what keeps us going is that we know we have to do these certain steps towards the vision and mission. But these small steps, although they may look trivial, are important to the longer vision. So we don't mind looking at a week-to-week, month-to-month basis to see what we have to do. So it's a matter of going step by step, making sure there's consistency in that, and then caring about the long term vision in the background. It's always in the background.

JS: Have you had any interesting experiences or opportunities arise whilst developing Edzuki?

JT: I think what's interesting is that it's a problem that we face as students, but somehow no one has ever tried to fix or solve it, even from a student perspective. It's almost a problem that is silent in terms of being a discussion in universities, which is intriguing as I would have imagined that if more than one person raised the same concern, people would have acted on it, but it seems not to be happening, so that was why I started this in the first place. To anyone, if there's a collective problem that people face, they would try to solve it as a group, but nothing exists within the scope. So just talking to other people and understanding that it is more of a problem than people think but it is a problem that remains silent.

At the very start of Edzuki when we were thinking about funding, approaching venture capitalists and institutions was an interesting experience because it opened our perspective on starting a company in terms of the financial aspect. But those were probably the 2 more interesting things so far.

JS: If anyone is trying to find Edzuki on the web, where can we find you or are there any release dates for when the website will go live?

JT: I think at the moment we're in the process of gathering reprints of books, so at the moment we don't have a working website. But the timeframe is that in the next 9-12 months we should have the first few books up in print. These will be books within the humanities and social sciences, but yeah, that's our timeframe for now.

JS: Are there any social media handles that people can follow?

JT: We've created a landing page for Edzuki which can be found here. Other than that, we're trying to see whether word of mouth is the strongest way of spurring on conversation about new books. We want to still test that avenue.

JS: I'm really looking forward to seeing what Edzuki will show us in the next 12 months, thanks for coming onto the series!

JT: Thanks Jinal for having me!