According to information in some newspapers, at some high schools in Hanoi, textbooks are purchased annually 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.

In response to the question of how publishers evaluate the discount rate (depending on the publisher) for textbook buyers and sellers reported in the press as 11-15%, a representative of the Vietnam Education Publishing House said that this discount rate is being misunderstood. This discount is actually the publishing cost.

"Publishing textbooks as well as publishing other books or newspapers all have costs, including: packaging, transportation, warehousing, delivery...

The textbook distribution fee is very low, especially in mountainous and remote areas. For example, the current newspaper distribution fee is from 22% to 25% of the cover price, much higher than the textbook distribution fee," a representative of the Vietnam Education Publishing House affirmed.

According to this publishing house, textbook prices are made up of many factors, focusing on 5 factors: Manuscript organization costs; royalties; production costs including paper and printing costs; 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 textbook sets "Connecting knowledge with life" and "Creative horizons" of the Education Publishing House also reach 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.

In fact, the organization of compiling, printing and publishing 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 publishing houses 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 and review of expert reviews; 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, reference books, etc.

Previously, 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 under the management of the Ministry of Education and Training has not performed well its duties and responsibilities in compiling, printing, and distributing textbooks, and has allowed violations and violations of the law to occur. The distribution costs (discounts) are high, and textbook prices are quite high," the monitoring team stated the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and Training.

According to the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Vietnam Fatherland Front at that time, the immediate thing to do was to have a strict control mechanism from the compilation, printing, and distribution stages and to reduce the price of textbooks to suit people's incomes and to propose that textbooks must be price-managed by the State.