Educational books are expensive. SENAI has over a thousand of them and wanted to give them away for free. Here’s what we learned about building a library app.
Technical education in Brazil has an access problem that rarely shows up in the headline statistics. The schools are there. The teachers are there. The curriculum exists. What’s often missing is the materials — the textbooks, the technical manuals, the career guides that students in wealthier institutions take for granted. A student at a SENAI school in Manaus and a student at a SENAI school in São Paulo are technically enrolled in the same network. Their access to study materials, historically, has not been the same.
SENAI had the content. Over a thousand educational publications — vocational textbooks, technical reference manuals, industry guides, career resources — produced by the institution over decades. The problem wasn’t that the content didn’t exist. The problem was that printing and distributing it at scale was expensive, slow, and inequitable. A school that got budget for physical books was fine. A school that didn’t was working around the gap however it could.
What We Built
The SENAI Estante Virtual (Virtual Bookshelf) was the answer to that distribution problem. Free access to SENAI’s full catalog of educational publications — on iOS, Android, and web — to any student who signed up.
The product decisions that shaped it were all made with a specific user in mind: a vocational student in a Brazilian city that isn’t São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, with a mid-range Android phone, studying on public transit or at home in the evening, possibly with inconsistent internet access.
Offline reading was non-negotiable. Brazil’s connectivity landscape is uneven. Requiring an active internet connection to read a textbook would have reproduced exactly the inequality the platform was trying to solve. If a student downloaded chapters at school or at a public Wi-Fi hotspot, they needed to be able to read them on the bus home. We built offline-first.
Simple signup was a deliberate product position. The instinct in institutional software is to add friction — verify your enrollment, confirm your school affiliation, fill out your profile. We pushed against that. Email or Google, and you’re in. The population we were trying to reach didn’t need more bureaucracy between them and a free textbook.
Navigation by technological area reflected how students actually look for materials. You’re studying industrial electronics. You want the electronics section. You don’t want to browse a flat list of 1000 titles by publication date.
The Classroom Integration Layer
The app wasn’t designed purely for solo self-study. Teachers needed to be able to bring it into their workflow. We built in sharing mechanisms that matched how teachers actually communicate with students: QR codes for in-classroom distribution, WhatsApp sharing (the dominant messaging platform in Brazil), and Google Classroom integration for schools already on that ecosystem.
A teacher who found a technical manual relevant to the week’s unit could share it directly to their class in seconds. That changed how the content could be used — not just as a supplemental resource students might find on their own, but as an active part of instruction.
The interactive tour for new users mattered more than it might seem. Vocational students are not always experienced with app-based learning platforms. Reducing the “how does this work?” barrier at first launch meant more students actually used what they’d installed rather than opening the app once and forgetting it.
🚧 Need more context: What were the download numbers? What did DAU/MAU look like after the first year? Was there data on offline usage rates — what percentage of reading sessions happened without an active internet connection?
What the Equity Argument Actually Means
It’s easy to write “equitable access” in a product brief. It’s harder to design for it specifically.
The offline-first decision cost something. Syncing content for offline use is more complex than just serving it from a CDN. The simple signup decision cost something too — less user data at registration, harder to track engagement by school or region without supplemental analytics work.
We made both calls because the alternative was building something that worked great for students who already had decent access and internet connectivity, which is not the problem we were trying to solve.
A student in Manaus now has the same library access as a student in São Paulo. That sentence is true because someone decided the offline infrastructure was worth building. Those decisions aren’t glamorous but they’re the ones that determine who the product actually serves.
🚧 Need more context: Were there specific regions or schools where adoption was tracked? Any teacher or student feedback collected on how the app changed their study habits? Was the platform featured in any SENAI communications or external reviews?