IPA Urges Georgia to Rethink One-Textbook-Per-Subject Plan

What is Georgia changing? How its schools get textbooks. The International Publishers Association (IPA) said on October 21, 2026 that amendments to Georgia's law on primary and secondary education, adopted by Parliament earlier this year, mean Georgian schools will shift by 2028 to a single textbook per subject, provided by the government, instead of choosing among books from local educational publishers.

The IPA is asking the Georgian government to reconsider.

How the system works now, and what replaces it

The IPA describes the current system "according to reports." Groups of authors worked with different publishers and submitted their textbooks to the education ministry. Specialist review panels evaluated them before they received ministry approval. Schools could then choose among several approved textbooks for each subject and year.

Under the new model, the IPA says, the ministry itself will produce the textbooks through "experts" it selects, on a "one book for all schools" principle.

The IPA says the Education Ministry explained the change as a way to streamline school education. It also says critics have raised concerns about the state's alleged intent to control textbook content. The IPA statement does not quote the ministry directly, and PT has not seen a ministry statement in English. The IPA notes that Georgia's move follows similar initiatives in Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

What the IPA said

Jessica Sänger, who chairs the IPA's Freedom to Publish Committee, said: "The shift to single government textbooks is a severe restriction of the freedom to publish in the educational space. We urge the Georgian government to reconsider and create conditions for diverse resources for all types of learner."

Christoph Pienkoss, who chairs the IPA's Educational Publishers Forum, argued on quality and cost. "The best educational outcomes – both in terms of didactics and of cost-efficiency – are achieved when governments collaborate with teachers and publishers to provide a range of educational resources that secure choice for teachers and pupils," he said. Single textbook policies, he said, "deprive teachers of a broad range of expertise that can support them in their work, and the ratio between quality and costs is always negative."

José Manuel Anta, vice chair of the forum, said Georgian teachers "should be allowed to choose those textbooks that best suit their students."

The IPA says its provisional member, the Georgian Book Association, and its associate member, the European Educational Publishers Group, have also responded to the decision.

Part of a wider freedom-to-publish push

This is the IPA's second freedom-to-publish statement in three days. On October 19 it backed Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial's appeal in Mexico, after the country's industrial property agency fined the publisher over a person's name and image in Karla de la Cuesta's investigative book Todo a la luz. PT covered that in IPA Backs PRH Appeal Over Mexico's Todo a la luz Ruling.

Earlier this month, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the IPA published its 2026 report on the state of freedom to publish around the world. The Georgia statement was issued as a Freedom to Publish press release, alongside the Educational Publishers Forum: the IPA treats a state monopoly on school books as a publishing freedom issue, not only an education policy one.

Why it matters for authors

Most trade authors never write a school textbook, but many educational authors do, and for them a single-textbook rule removes the market. In the system the IPA describes, author teams worked with competing publishers and pitched for ministry approval. Under a ministry-run "one book for all schools" model, there is one buyer, one book per subject, and authors chosen by the ministry.

There is also a content question. When a state writes the only textbook allowed, it decides what every pupil in the country reads in each subject. The IPA's committee chair calls that "a severe restriction of the freedom to publish."

The change is set to take effect by 2028, so there is time for the government to revisit it. Writers and educators who work in the region, or who sell rights there, should watch for the Georgian Book Association's next steps and any revision to the law.