Can the British publishers think about reducing the cost of text books?

Oct 04, 2012 Letters

Dear Editor,
Personal and professional commitments prevented me from commenting on the textbook issue in Guyana. I am therefore seek your indulgence in adding my two cents belatedly.
I am perturbed by the high cost of textbooks in the region, Guyana included. In some instance, it costs US$40 for an elementary school text. Parents spend more per year for elementary textbooks than I have spent per year in graduate school in the US. Further, despite the expensive textbooks we are not seeing excellent academic results at the primary or secondary levels.
In your newspaper, you explored the option of e-books, which would fit nicely with the One Laptop Per Family project in Guyana. As a homeschooler, I seldom use textbooks.
My daughter’s entire sixth grade education is based on open-source resources found on the internet and a few Ipad applications.
Many of the international schools are also going the route of eliminating textbooks in any form.
For the near future, it seems as though the majority of the public and private schools will continue to use textbooks.
It should be posed to the British Publishers Association to explore the possibilities whether anything could be done to reduce the cost of the books in Guyana and the rest of the region.
Can they, for example, produce a cheaper version of the books specifically for the Guyanese market (as some books have international versions, which are cheaper than the versions produced for US and European markets)?
Even though I appreciate that business of school textbooks is, well, a business, I would like to think that they are also interested in students getting an education and parents and countries not going broke to provide it.
Candice Ramessar,
Consumers International, Jamaica

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Can the British publishers think about reducing the cost of text books?

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