Vietnam's educational publishing house speaks out about textbook discounts.

Accordingly, publishing textbooks, as well as other book publications, incurs costs, including packaging, transportation, warehousing, and delivery. The cost of publishing textbooks is very low, especially in mountainous, remote, and rural areas.

According to this publisher, the price of textbooks is made up of many factors, focusing on five main elements: manuscript preparation costs; royalties; production costs (paper and printing); distribution costs (also known as publishing costs); and financing costs (also known as interest on loans).

In particular, the cost of organizing the manuscript for a set of textbooks can amount to hundreds of billions of VND. The total royalties for the two sets of textbooks "Connecting Knowledge with Life" and "Creative Horizons" published by Vietnam Education Publishing House are nearly 70 billion VND annually.

Furthermore, production costs also amount to trillions of VND (including paper and printing), while the current production costs of Vietnam Education Publishing House are entirely based on bank loans. Costs for distribution or publishing fees are also very significant expenses.

Currently, the organization of textbook compilation, printing, and distribution is not the exclusive domain of Vietnam Education Publishing House. A total of 7 publishing houses have been licensed by the Ministry of Information and Communications to publish textbooks, but only 6 of them actually participate in the publishing process.

According to a representative from the Vietnam Education Publishing House, the textbook production process involves eight steps: author identification; model development (overall outline, detailed outline, sample lesson planning, experimental teaching); drafting of rough manuscripts, and author feedback and revisions. This is followed by design editing; internal review and expert feedback; two-round national review; book introduction; teacher training on textbook use; and textbook distribution.

The price of textbooks is made up of many costs (as mentioned). According to regulations, this unit and other textbook publishers must declare prices based on these cost components and must obtain approval from the Price Management Department ( Ministry of Finance ).

The Vietnam Education Publishing House also stated that its profits do not come primarily from textbooks but mainly from other books such as supplementary books and reference books.