With textbook prices rising year after year, it bears heavily on parents when every academic year begins. To monitor price adjustments, the Consumer Council has released results of its annual textbook price survey, which indicated that over 90% of the textbooks surveyed are set to have a price increase in the new academic year. Average increase rate of the surveyed is 4%, close to the inflation rate.
In this survey of 634 commonly used textbooks (155 for primary schools and 479 for secondary schools) from 25 publishers, the Council found that a large majority (97.3%) of them will increase price by 1.6% to 7.4% for the new academic year. Only 17 textbooks (2.7%) will freeze in price but most of them are for non-major subjects such as Religious Studies, Music, History, Life Education and Chinese Literature, etc. Besides, none of the textbook surveyed has a price drop. This situation of no price reduction has been observed for two consecutive years.
As compared with last year, textbook price is 4% higher on average, exceeding the 3.7% of last year and the 3.6% of the year before, but lower than the inflation rate of 4.4% over the same period.
The average increase is 3.9% for primary school textbooks and 4.1% for secondary school textbooks. Overall, around 10% of textbooks have recorded a price increase outpacing the inflation, of which 80% are for secondary schools.
The listed price of textbooks for primary schools has increased 1% to 4.3% on average by subjects, with Putonghua textbooks recording the highest average increase of 4.3%. For secondary schools, textbooks for different subjects have their listed prices raised from 2.7% to 4.4%, of which Biology and Geography textbook prices have both increased by 4.4% which is on par with the inflation rate.
The Education Bureau has fully implemented the "Policy of Debundling Textbooks and Teaching/Learning Materials for Pricing" in previous academic year in order to stabilize textbook prices and prevent bundled sale of textbooks with teaching materials. The policy enables students and teachers to purchase textbooks and teaching materials according to needs and based on clearly marked prices. Of all the surveyed textbooks, apart from those without add-ons, all the others have already been priced, debundled from teaching materials.
Publishers responded that price increase is attributed to the rising operation costs including rent, staff salary, logistics, higher printing costs and also to the decrease in student numbers and senior secondary students taking fewer elective subjects. According to the figures provided by paper suppliers and printers, printing cost and paper cost have slightly increased by 0.6% and 0.2% respectively this year. Some textbook suppliers also pointed out that price was driven up because a considerable amount of resources has been invested in developing expensive e-teaching materials to meet the Government's e-learning policy.
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