Confused about choosing textbooks for your child

About a month before the end of the school year, in my child’s class’s Zalo group, the homeroom teacher asked parents to download the application of a local book publishing company to register to buy textbooks for the new school year for their children. There would be nothing to say if this application worked smoothly, but in reality, more than half of the parents in the class reported that they could not buy books for their children on this application.

Parents kept sending messages with questions while the teacher could not resolve them, and the deadline for registering to buy books as she announced was only 3 days. To ensure that they had new books for their children and did not have to run around to 3-4 stores to buy the full set of books, every parent tried their best... After many times of struggling to uninstall the old application, then installing the new application without success, I had to go directly to the information page of this book publishing company to order the books before I was successful.

We really don’t understand why we have to install the publisher’s application when we only buy a new set of textbooks once a year? Not to mention that this application is not yet complete, causing inconvenience to customers. If digital transformation is for convenience, we always encourage it, but half-heartedly, it is really unnecessary.

Speaking of buying textbooks, the reason why parents have to register to buy books for their children without going through the school is because according to regulations, if the school purchases textbooks in large quantities, it must follow the regulations on bidding and selecting suppliers... This is too complicated for many schools.

In fact, letting parents buy textbooks for their children themselves will limit many negative aspects in choosing suppliers. Parents can take the initiative in purchasing without depending on the school. However, this also makes many parents confused because not all schools use the same set of textbooks from the same publisher. Moreover, in each subject, the school chooses different textbooks, so buying books for their children will be difficult for parents. For example, at the beginning of the last school year, all the textbooks and exercise books for my children's subjects were from the same set, but the English subject was from a different publisher. So some families bought the wrong ones and had to buy them again, causing waste, some families had to go to all the bookstores to find them, even had to ask acquaintances in other provinces to help them find them... It was really troublesome.

In the 4.0 era, it is more convenient for parents to buy textbooks online from the publisher. However, this purchase is still recommended by the school to the publisher. Does this ensure fair competition between the publishers?

Not to mention the waste of textbooks that has been mentioned too much but the relevant departments have not been able to overcome. There are two sisters in the same family who are two grades ahead of each other, but the younger sister cannot re-study her sister's textbook even though the textbook has not been revised. It is simply because in the textbook there are some exercises that the children do directly in the book; the reading exercises are also graded directly in the book by the teacher. Not to mention, there are some subjects where the school chooses a different set of textbooks each year, so reusing the textbooks of the previous students is impossible. Therefore, the economic burden still falls on the parents' shoulders.

For families with school-age children, buying textbooks is mandatory, but there seem to be so many obstacles that schools are looking for ways to “dodge” them. And this has made things difficult for parents.