In its continuing effort to recognize quality private school textbooks, the National Book Development Board (NBDB) announced that it received 30 Mathematics and English textbooks as nominees for the 2008 Quality Seal Awards (QSA).

“This 50 percent increase from last year’s 20 nominations is due to the opening of the awards to English textbooks,” said Salvador Briola Jr., officer-in-charge of the agency’s Accreditation and Incentives Division (AID) which manages the awards. “Last year, we launched the awards for excellent Mathematics textbooks.”

Unlike in its first year, when it was usually the heads of private schools who nominated the best Math textbooks being used in their schools, awards coordinator Lily Pahilanga noted that this year’s nominations show that NBDB-registered publishers are excited for this year’s awards, as shown by the number of textbooks confidently nominated by the publishers themselves.

“The awards aim to recognize quality books written and published by Filipinos,” said Dr. Dennis T. Gonzalez, the Board’s chair. “We want to inform our people that we have excellent Mathematics textbooks being used in our private schools.”

The NBDB Quality Seal is given to a published private school textbook after undergoing strict evaluation by NBDB’s pool of evaluators from reputable learning institutions and research centers.

After undergoing stringent evaluation by top Mathematics experts from different centers of excellence last year, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry and Statistics by Phoenix Publishing House Inc., Growing Up with Math 5 by FNB Educational Inc., Intermediate Algebra by JC Palabay Enterprises Inc., Realistic Math Worktext 3 by Sibs Publishing House Inc., and XP Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry & Statistics by Vibal Publishing House received the 2007 Quality Seal this year.