In response to information from textbook trading sources about textbook discounts on the market currently reaching 11-15%, a representative of Vietnam Education Publishing House said that this discount is actually the publishing cost.

Accordingly, publishing textbooks as well as publishing other book publications must have costs, including: packaging, transportation, warehousing, delivery... Such textbook publishing fees are very low, especially in mountainous, remote and isolated areas.

According to this publishing house, textbook prices are made up of many factors, focusing on 5 main factors: manuscript organization costs; royalties; production costs (paper and printing); circulation costs (also known as distribution costs); financial costs (also known as interest).

Of which, the cost of organizing the manuscript of a set of textbooks is up to hundreds of billions of VND. The total royalties of the two textbooks "Connecting knowledge with life" and "Creative horizon" of the Vietnam Education Publishing House are nearly 70 billion VND annually.

In addition, production costs also amount to thousands of billions of VND (including paper and printing costs), while the current production costs of Vietnam Education Publishing House are entirely based on bank loans. Circulation costs or publishing fees are also very large expenses.

Currently, the organization of compiling, printing and distributing textbooks is not the exclusive right of Vietnam Education Publishing House. There are a total of 7 publishing houses licensed by the Ministry of Information and Communications to publish textbooks, but only 6 publishing houses participate in the publication.

According to the representative of the Vietnam Education Publishing House, the textbook making process of this unit must go through 8 steps: building the author; building the model (overall outline, detailed outline, compiling sample lessons, teaching experiments); compiling rough drafts, giving comments to adjust the author's draft. Next is editing design; internal reading review, reviewing expert opinions; two-round national review; introducing books; training teachers to use books; supplying textbooks.

The price of textbooks consists of many costs (as mentioned). According to regulations, this unit and other textbook publishing units must declare prices based on the costs that make up the price and must be approved by the Price Management Department (Ministry of Finance).

Vietnam Education Publishing House also said that the publisher's profit does not come from textbooks but mainly from other books such as supplementary books, reference books, etc.