THE DISTRIBUTION of textbooks to the island's high schools will be off to a late start for the upcoming academic year due to changes in the Ministry of Education's method of acquiring the texts.
Up to last year, the ministry's policy was to allow established book sellers, such as Sangster's Book Store, Kingston Book Shop and Time Store to supply books to individual schools under the ministry's book rental scheme.
In May this year however, the ministry took the decision to acquire the books directly through the agents of book publishers, in a move aimed at cutting costs.
Steadman Fuller, managing director of Kingston Book Shop and member of the Book Industry Association, said the change was likely to result in a delay in books reaching the school this academic year.
"With the best of efforts it is going to be very difficult to get the books in the schools before school reopens," said Mr. Fuller, who is also an agent for a number of publishing houses, including Oxford University Press and Macmillan.
He said distribution of the books had only started this week and with 340 schools all over the island to cover, agents would have a difficult task to supply all schools in time for the new academic year.
"I don't think it was the matter of changing the system which might have delayed the books, I think to a large extent it would have been the time when the change was done and how efficiently it was handled," he said.
Under the book rental scheme, high school students are required to pay a flat fee of $1,000 for which they are allowed access to their main text books for the school year.
Acting Chief Education Officer in the Ministry Jackie Cousins side-stepped the issue of whether the ministry had implemented the new purchasing arrangements too quickly. However, she said measures would be put in place to deal with the dislocation in the schools, if the books turned out to be late. She could not say what the measures were.
However, she argued that the purchasing arrangements would save the Ministry of Education millions of dollars as it would no longer buy the books through books stores, many of whom are also agents for overseas publishers. This, she said, would cut out mark-up costs from agents to book stores, resulting in a better deal for the ministry.
"The whole thing was to try to bring better prices into purchasing the books," she said.
