On August 9, a representative of the Vietnam Education Publishing House confirmed that the information about the discount rate for textbook dealers of 11-15% is incorrect. This discount is actually the publishing cost.

"Publishing textbooks as well as other book publications or newspapers all have costs, including packaging, transportation, warehousing, delivery... The cost of publishing textbooks like this is very low, especially in mountainous and remote areas," he said, citing that the current newspaper publishing fee is from 22% to 25% of the cover price, much higher than the cost of publishing textbooks.

According to the representative of Vietnam Education Publishing House, the price of textbooks is made up of many factors, focusing on 5 factors: Cost of organizing the manuscript; royalty cost; production cost including paper and printing; circulation cost (also known as distribution cost); financial cost (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 textbook sets "Connecting knowledge with life" and "Creative horizon" of the Education Publishing House also reach nearly 70 billion VND annually.

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

In fact, the organization of compiling, printing and distributing textbooks is not the exclusive right of the Vietnam Education Publishing House. Currently, there are a total of 7 publishing houses licensed by the Ministry of Information and Communications to publish textbooks, but only 6 publishers participate in publishing because publishing textbooks is not as easy as mentioned above.

Explaining whether the Vietnam Education Publishing House makes huge profits when publishing textbooks, the representative of this unit said that the textbook making process of this unit must go through 8 steps: building the author; building a model including a general outline, detailed outline, compiling sample lessons, teaching experiments; compiling rough drafts, and giving comments to adjust the author's drafts.

Next is editing and design; internal review of expert review opinions; two-round national review; book introduction; teacher training on book use and textbook supply. Therefore, in the cost structure of textbooks, there are many costs that the Vietnam Education Publishing House has listed above.

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). "The publisher's profit does not come from textbooks, but mainly from other books such as supplementary books and reference books," the representative affirmed.

Previously, social networks and newspapers were abuzz with information that at some high schools in Hanoi, textbooks were purchased according to the instructions of the Department of Education and Training of the districts. Therefore, the "commission" percentage is discounted from the price of textbooks, schools and teachers do not receive.

Calculated according to the lowest discounted "commission" percentage of 11%, each set of books, the preferential level is 38,600 VND.

Although the commission discount for each set of textbooks is less than 40,000 VND, if calculated on millions of primary school students in Hanoi, the commission amount is up to hundreds of billions of VND. And many schools affirm that they buy textbooks according to instructions from the district education and training departments.

At the end of 2023, the monitoring delegation of the National Assembly Standing Committee reported that the maximum distribution fee (discount) for textbooks according to the new curriculum for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years is 29% of the cover price, workbooks are 33%, and teachers' books are 15%.

For the 2022-2023 school year, the discount on textbooks is 28.5% of the cover price, workbooks are 35%, and teachers' books are 15%.

"The Vietnam Education Publishing House has not performed its duties and responsibilities well in compiling, printing and distributing textbooks, and has committed violations and violations of the law. The publishing costs (discounts) are high, and the prices of textbooks are quite high," the monitoring team stated. They recommended that there must be a strict control mechanism from the compilation, printing and distribution stages and that textbook prices must be reduced to suit people's incomes and that textbook prices must be managed by the State.