The question is not whether Bangladesh can print cheaply. It is whether it can build a publishing industry that the world wants to buy from.

Bangladesh’s Education Minister, Dr ANM Ehsanul Hoque Milon, used a recent seminar hosted by the Bangladesh Publishers and Booksellers Association (BAPUS) at Dhaka’s Bangla Academy to make a striking claim: that the country’s publishing sector has the potential to become one of the world’s largest book exporters.

The competitive logic is real enough. Bangladesh benefits from lower labour costs and a functioning commercial print sector developed largely in service of a substantial domestic education market. With books retailing at considerably higher prices in developed markets, the arbitrage opportunity exists in principle.

The Gap Between Signal and Reality

The numbers, however, tell a more cautious story. Bangladesh’s 2024 printed materials exports stood at approximately $7.23 million – placing it 83rd globally, according to Observatory of Economic Complexity data. That’s a long way from major export nation status.

The domestic market itself is highly concentrated. Of Bangladesh’s roughly 1,200 publishers – spanning around 400 trade, 650 educational and 150 religious imprints – the International Publishers Association – IPA reports that 99% of sector revenue comes from home-market sales, with publishing activity clustered heavily around the annual Ekushey Book Fair.

The Structural Barriers Are Well-Documented

Cost competitiveness in labour is offset by costly inputs: paper and ink prices roughly doubled between 2020 and 2022, with supply chains subject to syndicated pricing pressures that squeeze margins before export economics even enter the calculation.

The IPA has also highlighted persistent piracy, uneven editorial standards, and critical skills shortages in editing, design and rights management – the disciplines that export markets actually require.

Compounding this, the government’s monopoly on school textbook supply through the National Curriculum and Textbook Board limits the private sector’s ability to build the scale and quality standards that international buyers expect.

The View From the Beach

Ministerial encouragement is the easy part. Moving from low-cost print manufacturing to a publishing export sector capable of competing on rights, discoverability and editorial standards requires coordinated investment that ministerial speeches rarely specify.

BAPUS has the representative infrastructure – it holds Class A membership of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry – but trade association convening capacity is not a substitute for the harder work of aligning quality assurance, digital workflows, ISBN and metadata compliance, and international distribution partnerships.

Bangladesh may yet become a meaningful presence in price-sensitive export markets – South Asian academic supply, diaspora trade, potentially lower-cost co-editions for African educational markets. But the minister’s framing inverts the actual challenge.

The question is not whether Bangladesh can print cheaply. It is whether it can build a publishing industry that the world wants to buy from.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.