School textbook price hikes have grown with average rates rising to 3% from last year's 1.8% for the primary sector, and to 3.7% from 1.5% for secondary schools.

The Consumer Council today released its annual textbook price survey results, which covered 36 publishers and 631 textbooks, including 267 primary and 364 secondary textbooks.

The increase is set against rising price movements as the economy rebounds, though the Composite Consumer Price Index in the preceding 12-month period was up only 0.4%, the council said.

In the primary sector, the year's biggest price rises are recorded in English (4%), maths (3.6%), and general studies (3.5%). In the secondary sector, they are in commerce and accounting (5%), computing and IT (4.5%), and history (4.3%).

Textbooks in the top 10% of the highest price increases were named, for consumers' information, in the July issue of CHOICE. They ranged from 4.7% to 5% for primary textbooks, and 5.1% to 11.8% for secondary textbooks.

Paper costs up

Publishers said the hike is attributable to rising paper costs, ranging from 6% to 13%, and other expenses like staff, rent, transportation and the production of IT teaching aids. But printing costs remained largely unchanged, with some falling slightly.

Other factors include:

* increases in research costs as frequent curriculum reform shortens textbooks' lifecycle;

* the trend of using online and multimedia teaching aids requiring more investment;

* a shrinking market due to a low birth rate; and,

* the growing use of second-hand or photocopied textbooks over new ones.

The Education & Manpower Bureau called on publishers to take into consideration the economic situation and control their production costs to lower prices and lessen parents' burden.

School bargaining power

In the Guidelines for Printing Textbooks, the bureau said textbooks should be practical and without frills, by using inexpensive paper and avoiding high packaging and printing costs.

On book selection, the bureau said schools should, while looking for quality of content, also consider low prices as a determining factor and exercise their bargaining power.

In a recent council survey of schools on textbooks, 72 primary and 51 secondary schools said the main influential factor for their decision was the quality of the textbook, not its price.

But when compared with a similar survey in 1998, it showed the importance of price consideration has risen from 1.2 points to 1.8 points, on a four-point scale with "0" as "not important" and "3" as "very important".