The Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) has called out the National Book Development Board (NBDB), an attached Department of Education agency, for its policy on book publishers that has prevented it from realizing its intended purpose, mainly due to the lack of participation from its listed active 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.”
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 the lack of participation from its listed active publishers.
EDCOM also cited a 2025 study that mapped all NBDB-registered book enterprises and found that they are “heavily concentrated” in Luzon, with “very sparse presence” in the Visayas and Mindanao islands.
In Visayas, the commission said its northern provinces have no publishing-related enterprises at all, while Mindanao only has a handful of publishers and even printers for books, which is 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 Iloilo.
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.
Despite the digitization in almost everything we do, education and books remain tightly intertwined. If the quality of education is going to be improved by reforms, addressing the classroom backlog, teacher training, and the abolition of counterproductive practices such as allowing students to move up despite being unable to attain proficiency in their subjects, the DepEd issues with books, as demonstrated by the ineffectiveness of the National Book Development Board, also has to be resolved.
The DepEd already has a lot on its plate. However, it simply cannot afford to wait for the other issues to be addressed before it turns to its problems with the educational system’s books.*
