Money's too tight (to mention)
Cost of living crisis. The return of inflation. Record-breaking heatwaves. The looming threat of accelerating climate change. All big problems, but what's this got to do with textbooks?
On the day this newsletter goes out, temperatures in the UK are expected to hit 40°C or higher. Extreme weather events are becoming more common, contributing to wildfires across Europe, droughts in Africa, water rationing in the US, and the return of ominous hunger stones.
Brits love to talk about the weather, but the Met Office issuing a red warning isn’t normal (although you’d be forgiven for thinking it is, given the ambivalence towards the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target in the current Conservative leadership race). But recently another topic has dominated conversation.
Money has permeated the national consciousness.
Energy bills have become the UK’s go-to example of the spiralling cost of living. The consumer energy price cap jumped by 54% in April and predictions of a further £800-a-year rise in October now look rose-tinted. It’s not just energy. Categories representing more than 50% of the Office for National Statistics’ consumer price inflation basket are showing medium or high price rises. Inflation could hit 11% by the end of the year - a figure not seen in the UK since 1981.
Inflation is a global problem and it has hit textbook publishers and printers at a crucial crunch point – just as they’re due to be printing textbooks for the new school year.
How is this affecting different countries? Does it affect the way policy-makers view textbooks? And could there be an easy-yet-radical solution that might just help make real and immediate progress towards net zero targets?
Why is printing so expensive?
Let’s begin with a publishing cracker joke…
Q: What’s the most expensive thing you can do with a book?
A: Print it.
Like every good cracker joke, it’s not very funny but contains a kernel of truth. If you find issues that need resolving with a book, another round of edits would cost a bit more than you’d planned. But you know what would be really expensive? Pulping the book.
Everything a publisher spends up to print-ready files are fixed costs. Which is to say that you would need to spend the same regardless of how many copies of the book you go on to print. Even if your fixed costs increase, you still pay only once.
But printing is a variable cost. The unit price the publisher pays varies on the number of units being printed in the same run. The price of one unit in run of 1000 will be higher than the price of one unit in a run of 10,000. If your variable costs increase, you pay 10,000 times over.
There are three principal reasons why printing has become more expensive recently:
The price of raw materials has increased. There’s a worldwide paper shortage after manufacturers switched to producing cardboard over the pandemic. In addition, there has been industrial action at one of the major European paper mills, which further shortens supply. There are similar shortages in the chemicals involved in printing. Scarcity increases prices as customers compete for materials.
Electricity has become more expensive. Energy prices had started to increase before Russia invaded Ukraine as demand increased when countries started easing lockdown measures. War brought sanctions, which further restricted supply.
International exchange rates. Components for printing are traded internationally, which means that a local currency’s spending power relative to the dollar can exacerbate price fluctuations.
Who pays the price?
When the cost of bringing a product to market increases, someone somewhere has to foot the bill.
Option 1: The consumer
In Vietnam, there has been controversy after Vietnam Education Publishing House (VEPH) increased prices for its products by between 2 and 4 times the original price. Despite being owned by the state, VEPH has autonomy over its price-setting.
So far so bad for parents buying textbooks, but the real issue came when it was revealed that the publisher had made record profit, exceeding its targets by 40%.
Perhaps unsurprisingly there then followed a demand from the Ministry of Education for VEPH to review its publishing process and reduce its prices. Perceived profiteering was a bad look for a state-owned enterprise.
Option 2: The publisher
Morocco, meanwhile, has the opposite set-up. The publishers are private businesses, but the prices are set by the state. As the price of paper rose by 120%, publishers submitted a request to the government to increase prices. Initially they asked for an increase of 67%, but after a meeting with the Ministry lowered their request to 25%.
However, the cost of living was biting in Morocco and the price of textbooks became a culture war battlefront. The former director of books at the Ministry of Culture, Hassan El-Wazzani, criticised the publishers for being greedy and unprofessional – citing errors in books as a symptom that the sector had grown lazy from low levels of competition. Soon, maintaining the price of textbooks became a national priority.
After weeks of deliberation, the government announced that textbook prices would remain fixed. As a fig leaf, the announcement included an offer of help to publishers for finding solutions to reduce their costs. Ultimately, however, it will be the Moroccan publishers who pay the price of these increases.
Option 3: The government
Turkey1 traditionally provides students with free textbooks, but there’s a healthy private market for supplementary resources. These often fill gaps in the state-backed provision of core textbooks and are unregulated through any formal review process.
Amidst widespread reports of spiralling costs and supply chain issues with paper, Turkey’s approach to this year’s suite of state-funded textbooks may seem a little unconventional. In May, the government announced that it would distribute 100 million free resources to children across the country, stepping into – and effectively washing away – the supplementary market.
Turkey makes for an interesting case study. It highlights the scale of the problems caused by soaring prices as well as the scale of opportunity in the solution.
Turkey’s alternative economics
It should go without saying that 100 million is a huge volume of books. It’s one fifth of the total number of units sold worldwide from the entire Harry Potter series over 20 years.
So, is Turkey somehow managing to evade the issues that have plagued other countries? Well… no. Ninety percent of Turkey’s paper is imported and the cost has increased by more than 250% in a year. Printers are struggling to get hold of the amount of paper required and struggling to make government printing financially viable.
Since the state has closed its own printing houses, the printing business will be done by tender. The Ministry opened a tender for this, and the printing presses participating in the tender offered 120 cents per 16-page signature. The Ministry found this offer expensive and cancelled it on the grounds that ‘Sufficient competition conditions were not created’. In the second tender, opened two weeks later, the printers increased their bids to 135 cents. The Ministry found this unacceptable as well and went out to tender again. In the third tender, the printing presses increased the price of the signatures to 210 cents and the education minister had to agree with the printers at 207 cents. In short, 12 Turkish Lira (TL). […] In this case, the Ministry of National Education spends TL 476 million instead of 276 for 23 million supplementary books with an average of 10 signatures. […] Why? Because the New Economy Model could not keep up with the paper and other printing costs tied to the dollar.
And what is the New Economy Model? Under Erdogan’s leadership, Turkey has pursued an unconventional approach to monetary policy. In response to inflation, the government has cut interest rates in the belief that stimulating growth will bring inflation under control – the exact opposite approach being pursued by every other central bank.
Did it work?
No, reader, it did not.
Rapid inflation led to a currency crisis, with the Turkish Lira halving in value against the dollar.
Money to burn
And yet, one month after the Turkish government’s flagship policy of free textbooks was confirmed, the ultimate fate of those textbooks is being reported on.
At the end of each school year, the textbooks supplied at the start of the year are either binned or recycled.
For a country with acute financial woes and that in October 2021 finally ratified the Paris Agreement requiring it to report transparently on action taken to reduce emissions from 2024, this is extraordinary.
However, the state is stepping in to try to encourage more recycling under the auspices of Turkey’s commitment to environmental initiatives.
Action was taken to recycle the textbooks, notebooks and waste paper distributed to millions of students free of charge. Minister of National Education Mahmut Özer gave instructions for the recycling of textbooks, notebooks and waste paper distributed free of charge within the scope of Zero Waste and Environmentally Friendly 1000 Schools projects. Waste paper collection activities will be organized by the schools involved in the Environment Friendly 1000 Schools project. All students will be encouraged to participate in the campaigns to be carried out to ensure that students are sensitive to the environment and to raise awareness in this regard.
While recycling is better than landfill, we should treat the ultimate efficacy of this recycling effort with caution. On 12 July, the Mirror reported on tonnes of plastic waste that had been exported from the UK to Turkey for recycling, but which had been illegally dumped and burnt.
Scrutiny is often paid to the early stages of a book’s supply chain – paper sourcing, manufacturing standards, freight options – but more rarely to the final stages of its lifecycle. Recycling isn’t always as green as we want it to be.
Got 99 problems, but a ฿¥£$€ ain’t one
A common complaint appearing in Turkish media is that binning books at the end of the year does not teach children to respect knowledge or value property. Turkey’s not alone in having these concerns.
In late June in Saudi Arabia a new trend emerged on social media platforms - videos of students driving over their old textbooks to mark the end of exam season. The Saudi commentariat were shook. There were calls to remove the free textbook system, withhold grades from students who hadn’t returned their books, and include respect for the value of books in the school curriculum.
Just a few days later in the UK, another exam season was coming to a close. Lancashire fire and rescue service issued a plea to GCSE students to refrain from burning their textbooks, having been called to three separate textbook-related fires in one night.
But perhaps there’s hope offered by a book recycling initiative in the UAE, which has been warmly received as more environmentally friendly than throwing old textbooks in the trash. It “confirm[s] the importance of the textbook as a receptacle of knowledge”. The initiative is part of the UAE’s national agenda for preserving the environment.
There are obvious parallels with Turkey’s book recycling scheme. But there’s perhaps another common factor mentioned in passing by a thankful parent:
[Maryam Muhammad Al-Zaabi] explained that “[the books’] appearance is not beautiful, as it cannot be stored in a library in an organized manner, because it is not used.”
She said that her children get new books with each semester, noting that she used to store textbooks for the stage in which her youngest son or daughter would enter, in order to convey the answers. But constant curricular change has prompted her to dismiss the idea of storage.
She emphasized that recycling textbooks teaches students the culture of preserving textbooks.
Is constant curriculum change behind the annual churn of printing and disposal of textbooks? Could there be a solution within reach that reduces a significant annual cost and helps countries make progress on their green commitments?
It’s not easy being green
There’s a lot of talk about embedding sustainability in the classroom and weaving environmental awareness into subjects throughout the curriculum. Children are our future, goes the standard argument. They need to know what to do with the scorched earth they’ll inherit.
In April England’s Department for Education launched its Sustainability and Climate Change strategy with the bold vision that the UK will become “the world-leading education sector in sustainability and climate change by 2030”.
If you’re a hardened cynic, you might wonder if this is another metric designed for international competition rather than impact. You might also wonder whether our generation is absolving responsibility for action and change by deferring the hard work to the younger generation.
Teaching children to respect the environment, understand climate change, and be mindful of waste is important for any country looking towards ambitious long-term net zero targets. But thinking differently about the annual cycles of printing and curriculum change, and planning to reuse books could make a significant immediate reduction towards emissions targets.
To its credit, the DfE strategy highlights operations and supply chain as a key action area, with a focus around the circular economy (essentially, sharing and reusing), waste prevention, and resource efficiency. These are sensible - if unsexy - principles. And slowing the cycle of curriculum change models these principles perfectly.
Regular readers may remember that some countries are already taking innovative approaches to reduce the amount of paper used for printing and to increase the longevity of books.
These approaches aren’t a complete solution to the cycle of waste – I’ve consciously avoided talking about quality here – but they’re a start. And they save money at a time of financial crisis. So if we’re not talking about making curriculum change genuinely sustainable now, when will we?