Edcom report hits policy on weak book industry
MANILA, Philippines — While the textbook procurement process has been streamlined, the Department of Education (DepEd) has yet to address gaps in the process, according to the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2).
The commission particularly called out the National Book Development Board (NBDB), an attached DepEd agency, for its policy on book publishers.
“[W]hile NBDB lists 328 active publishers, only 10 publishers won all 60 lots in the latest DepEd bidding,” the commission said in its final report titled “Turning Point: A Decade of Necessary Reforms.”
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The agency is already 30 years old, but multiple Senate hearings revealed that the vision for NBDB was “far from realized,” according to Edcom, mainly because of lack of participation from its listed active publishers.
The Edcom also cited a 2025 study that mapped all NBDB-registered book enterprises and they are “heavily concentrated” in Luzon and with “very sparse presence” in the Visayas and Mindanao islands.
In Visayas, the Edcom said its northern provinces have no publishing-related enterprises at all, while Mindanao only has a handful of publishers and even printers for books, a burden for DepEd.
A figure by Edcom in its report showed that the Visayas provinces of Aklan, Iloilo and Cebu have publisher-only book-related enterprises, with publisher-sellers in Negros Occidental, three in Cebu and another in Ilolilo.
Mindanao has eight publisher-only enterprises in Surigao del Norte, Agusan del Norte, Misamis Oriental and Davao del Sur, while there are five publisher-sellers in Davao del Sur, South Cotabato, Misamis Oriental, North Cotabato, Davao del Norte and only two publisher-seller-printers in Davao del Norte and Sultan Kudarat.
Although DepEd survived the hurdles of book content development and its procurement, the delivery still moves too slowly and fails to reach classrooms due to weak warehousing systems, long transport routes, delayed release of budgets and supply chain bottlenecks. INQ
