Electronic publishing grows, industry scale continues to be maintained
At the Conference to deploy key tasks for Publishing, Printing and Issuing publications in 2026, Mr. Nguyen Nguyen - Director of the Publishing, Printing and Issuing Department said that the publishing industry currently maintains a large scale of operations despite facing many difficulties from the domestic and international economic context.
In 2025, the whole country had 51,574 publications, with 543.5 million printed copies. Of which, printed books reached more than 42,800 titles with about 457.6 million copies. The topic structure shows that textbooks, curriculum and reference materials account for about 32% of the total number of publications, continuing to play an important role in the structure of the industry. However, the large dependence on textbooks makes the overall scale of the industry easily affected when textbook output changes.
Regarding electronics, the whole country has more than 5,200 publications with about 35 million visits, a sharp increase compared to the previous year. Currently, 35 out of 52 publishers have participated in publishing and distributing e-books.
The digital transformation process in the industry is quite strong. More than half of publishers have participated in electronic publishing, showing that units are gradually adapting to new development trends of technology as well as reading needs in the digital environment," Mr. Nguyen Nguyen said.
Promoting Vietnamese reading culture and knowledge to the world
Mr. Phan Tam - Deputy Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism said that in the development of a country, there are fields that do not always create large economic growth but play a decisive role in the depth of social development.
Our publishing, printing and distribution are such a field. Books are not just a simple cultural product and publishing is not just a simple economic sector. From a broader perspective, publishing is the intellectual infrastructure of a nation, where knowledge is preserved, organized and passed down from generation to generation," said Mr. Phan Tam.
Mr. Phan Tam said that Resolution No. 80 of the Politburo on cultural development in the new era has affirmed an important viewpoint: Culture must become an endogenous resource and the soft power of the nation.
If cinema or performing arts can spread emotions, then books and publishing are the sustainable path to spread knowledge and form the ideological foundation of society. A strong culture always needs a strong publishing system and a country that wants to become a learning nation cannot lack a developing publishing ecosystem," Mr. Phan Tam emphasized.
According to Deputy Minister Phan Tam, in the face of strong movements in technology, market and the need to access knowledge of society, the publishing industry needs to proactively innovate thinking and development methods. In which, the immediate important task is to complete the legal framework for publishing in the digital environment, accelerate the progress of building the revised Publishing Law, and at the same time reorganize the publishing value chain on a technology platform.
Digital transformation in publishing is not just digitizing books or putting books online, but reorganizing the entire value chain of the industry, from organizing manuscripts, editing, content production to distribution and interaction with readers. We need to study the formation of a common digital publishing ecosystem for the entire industry to expand the reading market and improve the operational efficiency of publishers," said Mr. Phan Tam.
In addition, the industry needs to continue to develop reading culture, clean up the publishing market and strengthen bringing Vietnamese books and knowledge to the world through copyright cooperation activities and international publishing events.
