The National Association of Educational Book and Content Publishers (Anele) stressed this Wednesday that the average expenditure on textbooks per child is 18.84 euros less than a decade ago, and stood at 92.28 euros in 2020.
“Although it must be taken into account that approximately 50% of the students receive some kind of help from communities, councils and municipalities,” the association explained. The most expensive books are those for Primary Education, which averaged 112 euros per child.
The report also pointed out that the uncertainty with which the last course began conditioned decisions such as the renewal of the books of those courses that had completed the period of validity. “A situation that had an impact on the educational book market, which suffered a drop of 6.6%. The turnover figure reached 765.47 million euros last year, which takes us back to what was registered in 2014 and very far from the historical maximum registered in 2008 (898.28 million euros) “, pointed out the editors.
This reduction of around 130 million euros is produced, they stressed, “with 900,000 more students in the classrooms . ” “Last year a total of 41 million copies were sold with an average price of 17.97 euros per copy, a figure that represents 5 cents increase compared to the 2019-2020 academic year”.
Transition
Anele considered that the course that starts, 2021-22 is “a year of transition” towards a return to normality in the classrooms, after the emergence of Covid-19 and also due to the new curricular development and the integration of the new technologies in classrooms.
Regarding the latter, they warned that “the intervention of the administrations promoting the contracting and / or creation of certain digital resources for their distribution on educational platforms may pose a risk to pluralism and a return to the single book.”
The data managed by the publishers association for this course seems to be far from that panorama, since the offer of books and editorial educational content of the companies associated with Anele reaches 32,936 titles in paper and 25,805 in digital support.
“The Lomloe guarantees an important level of autonomy to the autonomous communities for the development of their curricula, but nothing prevents that, in the works that they are developing with the Ministry, a high level of agreement can be produced that, at least in the scientific areas, can produce a greater homogenization of teaching. The existence of 17 different editions of a mathematics book is completely incomprehensible as a consequence of the dispersion of educational policies, “said the report.
This causes more limited editions to be made to each territory, with the consequent increase in production costs and the final price of books.
