For some decades, textbooks have progressively become an important source for research carried out in the social sciences as well and as an important object of study. In countries such as Sweden, Germany, Spain and Argentina, institutions, specialized programs, academic groups and international nets, have been established with the aim of doing research on textbooks. In addition, the educational reforms that were implemented in many European and Latin-American countries during the 1990s and 2000 paid special attention to textbooks. This process was accompanied by research about how textbooks have been adapted to the new requirements imposed by the reforms and whether developments in academic circles influenced them.

In this context, textbooks were also rediscovered as a valuable source for the study of the construction of collective imaginary and of ideas, values and world views that emerged over time, circulated among different societies and were transmitted from generation to generation. Moreover, textbooks were not longer thought of as solely educational or didactic products, but also as the result of the convergence of other logics such as the marketplace, publishing companies and politics.

The call for papers on this subject, titled  Textbooks and societies: didactics, politics, culture and the market, edited by Martha Rodríguez (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina), wishes to explore textbooks in different national contexts and from varied perspectives, not mainly, but not necessarily in the framework of the History of Education and the above mentioned research topics.En este contexto, los libros de texto también fueron redescubiertos como objetos valiosos para el estudio de la construcción de imaginarios colectivos, para indagar en ideas, valores y visiones del mundo que, a lo largo del tiempo, estuvieron disponibles y circularon en las sociedades que los produjeron, al tiempo que eran transmitidos de generación en generación. Asimismo, los libros de texto empezaron a ser pensados no sólo como el producto de consideraciones de tipo didácticas o disciplinares, sino también como el resultado de la convergencia de otras lógicas como las del mercado, las empresas editoriales, la política.

La convocatoria abierta de este monográfico, que lleva por título Libros de texto y sociedades: entre didáctica, política, cultura y mercado, editado por Martha Rodríguez (Universidad de Buenos Aires. Argentina), tiene como propósito ahondar, desde la Historia de la Educación, múltiples enfoques y contextos nacionales diversos, en el campo de estudio de los libros de texto, principalmente, pero no sólo, bajo las perspectivas desplegadas en los párrafos anteriores.