Books from the Heart was launched in the belief that knowledge would vest needy children with the tools for education, and help to garner them better opportunities for the future. A key donor to Books from the Heart was home-grown publisher SNP Panpac. Lim Sun Sun finds out more about this far-sighted corporation.

Launched in March this year, Books from the Heart (BFTH) is yet another successful FFTH initiative which has provided books for 26 children’s homes which are already beneficiaries of FFTH’s bread program. The success of BFTH hinged on the contributions of magnanimous donors, not least SNP Panpac Pte Ltd which as the main sponsor, donated more than 2000 books.

	SNP Panpac Sales and Marketing Team

From home-grown success to regional leader

A homegrown enterprise, SNP Panpac is one of Singapore’s leading educational publishers. As the publisher of two famous imprints, EPB and Pan Pacific, and with 60 years of combined publishing experience behind it, SNP Panpac has established itself in the region as a major publisher of learning programmes, textbooks and other educational materials. The company traces its heritage to a bureau in the Ministry of Education that was set up to publish local textbooks in 1967. This led to many major co-publishing agreements with the former Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore, Ministry of Education, on a wide range of educational publications. This partnership has endured till today as SNP Panpac is the only textbook publisher in Singapore that works closely with the Ministry of Education. It continues to produce textbooks and multimedia products for all Singapore schools and plans to provide more valued services to school teachers to help them cope with rising expectations.

SNP Panpac publishes a comprehensive range of educational print materials and multimedia packages for the entire spectrum of the market, from pre-school to pre-university and in humanities, Mathematics and Science subjects as well as textbook packages for Mother tongue languages, i.e. Chinese, Malay and Tamil for Singapore schools. Besides publishing educational materials such as school textbooks, assessment books, CD-ROMs and a magazine called Young Generation to service all schools in Singapore, SNP Panpac has also co-published textbook packages with foreign Ministries of Education. At present, SNP Panpac Pte Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of SNP Corporation Ltd. SNP Corporation Ltd is listed on the Mainboard of The Singapore Exchange and is one of the leading media groups in Asia with core businesses in printing and publishing. SNP also has operating subsidiaries in Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia and Thailand.

Giving to the community

Even prior to participating in BFTH, SNP Panpac has always been a generous corporate citizen, actively providing free textbooks to needy students. Hence, when Ms Hazel Tan and Mrs Christine Laimer approached them about BFTH, SNP Panpac agreed immediately. To date, the company has donated 3,000 books comprising 2,000 assessment books for primary and secondary levels and 1,000 “Young Generation” magazines worth an estimated total retail value of $15,000 to BFTH. Says Marketing Manager Ms Wendi Wong about working with FFTH, “We have a good experience working with FFTH and are happy that we are able to play a small part in helping the needy to break the poverty cycle through education.”