Efforts to bring schools to book

Is there any alternative to the annual August school-book scramble? Louise Holden weighs up the options for parents

Are there any alternatives to August's costly scramble for school books? It's the busy season for Ireland's lucrative school book market. Parents are joining lengthy queues to spend hundreds of euro on kilos of books. It's a ritual that every parent dreads as they stand in line with their child's booklist in hand praying that they can complete the job in one visit.

Invariably, not every title is available. When each book is finally ticked from the list the damage can range from €80 for a junior infant to €800 for four children of various school-going ages.

The Irish school book market is unregulated. Schools compile independent booklists and publishers can offer as many options for each subject as the market can handle. The upside of this for the publishers is a thriving educational book market worth more than €50 million a year. This market has grown by 16 per cent, above inflation, over three years. The primary school book market alone has showed an increase of 40 per cent since 2000, to a current value of €22 million.

The benefit for teachers is plenty of choice as publishing sales reps circulate the schools giving new titles the hard sell. Students enjoy up-to-date, glossy material in the classroom - no title is allowed to obsolesce for long.

The losers are the parents. Every year the cost of books goes up and constantly updated titles mean that books can rarely be passed on to younger siblings. Because no two schools have the same booklist, selling texts on is a complicated business.

The new workbook format, in which children are encouraged to write answers, means that parents cannot reuse this expensive alternative to the traditional copybook. Each year, hundreds of thousands of workbooks and textbooks are binned as parents prepare to trudge down to the local educational suppliers and replenish the stocks again.

Parents' groups constantly ask why booklists vary so widely from year to year and from school to school. The rapid turnover of material complicates book rental schemes, makes re-sale difficult and renders re-use within families almost impossible.

The Department of Education has no role to play in the school book market - the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA)provides publishers with information regarding curricular developments and beyond that, publishers hold all the cards.

"Some years ago there was some monitoring of primary textbooks, but recently the Department of Education has retracted and adopted a free market approach," says John Hammond, deputy chief executive of the NCCA. "There is an argument for standardising school book usage between schools - it would certainly simplify matters for parents."

But there is a downside, says Hammond. "If the State standardied all textbooks there would be no diversity in terms of reference material. Single textbooks would replace the curriculum in some subjects."

Parent Tim Hurley believes that school book transfer between parents would be a lot simpler if there was a central repository for the nation's used material.

With this is mind, he set up schoolbookexchange.ie. "I come from a family of 10 and the house is coming down with old schoolbooks that were used only once," says Hurley. "When my son's booklist for junior infants cost me €85 I figured there had to be a cheaper option."

When he started looking into the manner in which booklists are compiled he was taken aback.

"I'm flabbergasted that the schools operate in such an unco-ordinated manner," says Hurley. "Schools running rental schemes make no effort to sell those books on when they are taken off the school booklist. "One school in the south east dumped three skiploads of books this summer - many of which were only a year old. Surely there are other schools where these books are still on the list?"

Hurley got his site up and running last year and already has 15,000 registered books for sale or exchange. Parents can post up lists of available titles and prices. It's free to post books for sale and to search for titles, but a €1 fee is incurred if a purchase is made. The Schoolbookexchange.ie service does not handle the books - parents make their own postal or delivery arrangements.

The burgeoning online retail market for Irish school books is likely to influence the market - if nothing else it gives parents an alternative to queuing and multiple trips to the book shop. In the long term, online retailers have the potential to offer better value for parents.

John Cunningham, managing director of Ireland's newest online school book retailer schoolbooks.ie, believes that convenience will draw parents to the Internet and better prices will keep them there.

"The cost of school books is a constant issue for parents," says Cunningham, whose new site will join scholars.ie and schoolbooksonline.ie on the online market.

"Online retailers have lower outlays and should, in theory, be able to cut prices. At the moment there is no one large nationwide supplier of school books who has the muscle to negotiate better deals with publishers. If online retailers gain ground, they have the potential to put pressure on publishers to drop their prices."

Hubert Mahony, director of the Irish Educational Publishers Association, does not agree. "I believe the cost of postage that online services incur will eat up any savings made by buyers," he says. "The idea that online retailers can pressure publishers to drop prices is not valid - there is enough competition between publishers to keep prices down as it is."

When asked about the idea of standardising text book usage across schools, Mahony counters that "teachers would have a fit".

About 20 per cent of Irish schools run book rental schemes, but their efforts have been complicated by the introduction of workbooks. Publishers are increasingly offering workbooks in which children can do their home exercises without using a copybook. These are very convenient for teachers, who can simply direct children to set questions each evening. From the point of view of re-sale or rental, however, workbooks are obsolete after one use.

Meanwhile, parents must grin and bear it.

Tom Lillis, general secretary of the Catholic Secondary Parents Association claims his organisation has made several approaches to the Department looking for interventions that might take the burden off parents.

"We have suggested that schools be required to leave booklists unchanged for a set number of years in order to facilitate lending libraries and book exchange," says Lillis.

"The introduction of workbooks is a serious obstacle to school book re-use. We advocate CD-roms as the way forward but there's no advantage to this format from the publishers' point of view."

Eleanor Petrie of the National Parents' Council Post Primary is looking forward to the day when school books are available on CD-rom. This format would do away with the need for heavy school bags and cut the cost of educational supplies considerably, she says.

Naturally, Petrie concedes, CD-roms won't make any impact until all schools provide computer access in the classroom.

"School books on CD-rom are not going to hit classrooms for a few years yet but when they do, the mad and costly craze of August book buying will finally be over," she predicts.