Perlego

Perlego is a digital library that offers readers unlimited access to over 1 million academic, professional and non-fiction eBooks. They have been billed as “the Spotify for Textbooks” by the Evening Standard. It is a membership-based service that allows users to read any book available in the library for the duration of their membership.

Perlego offers ebooks in 5 languages: English, Spanish, Italian, German and French, from local and international publishers. The service is available worldwide and allows users to read both online and offline on most smartphones, tablets or laptop devices.

History
Perlego was founded in 2017 in London, United Kingdom by Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, both Belgian natives and recent university graduates.

Drawing from their personal experiences with the high and rising cost of university textbooks, and noting the convenience of accessing music and films via subscription models like Netflix and Spotify, the founders aimed to increase global access to academic resources. They did this by offering students an "all-you-can-read" subscription model, providing a more affordable and convenient alternative to purchasing new textbooks while aiding publishers in reclaiming market share lost to online piracy.

Funding
Perlego was initially self-funded. Its pre-seed funding was derived from the profit made from Gauthier’s previous business venture – Iconic Matter. In January 2017, Perlego raised £850,000 in a round of seed funding. This was led by angel investors from the UK, Belgium and France, with Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman and LoveFilm founder Simon Franks being notable participants. In September 2018, Perlego raised a further £3,500,000 in a venture round led by Accelerated Digital Ventures, with further participation from its existing angel investors. In November 2019, Perlego closed its Series A fundraising round, having raised a total of £7,000,000. The fundraising was led by Charlie Songhurst, Dedicated VC, and Thomas Leysen (Chairman of Mediahuis and Umicore), with Perlego’s existing investors all reinvesting on a pro-rata basis. In March 2022, Perlego closed its Series B fundraising round, raising $50,000,000. The round was led by Mediahuis Ventures.

Services
Perlego’s content library currently contains over 1,000,000 titles in English, Italian, Spanish French and German, covering more than 900 separate disciplines from aeronautics to zoology. At the moment Perlego works with over 3,000 publishing houses who provide content for the service, including major academic publishers such as Wiley and Bloomsbury.

Users can access titles via their browser on desktop computers or download an application on mobile devices where it is also possible to download books for offline reading. Users can highlight and make notes.

Perlego partnered with the University of West London in 2022 to provide its full catalogue to all UWL students.