Subsidies to clarify the concept of paradidatic book

Abstract

The term “paradidatic book”, created in the context of the Brazilian publishing industry, is imprecise and gets confused with others, like informative book and complementary material. The publishers themselves and academic texts on the subject do not contribute to its clarification. The present work aims to understand the concept, seeking to clarify controversies surrounding its identity. Methodologically, the study occurred in two moments: in the first one the use of the term by the publishing sector was analyzed, using a sample of websites of seventeen publishers. In the second, a bibliographic study was carried out that allowed to understand how academic texts and documents of public policy perceive the term. The findings demonstrate that commercial and pedagogical factors contributed to the production of paradidatic books, and confirmed the imprecision of the use of the term both by publishers and in academic texts. In the editorial context and in the public policy documents, the term has been losing strength, although the practice of supplementing the textbook by teachers continues to be studied in the academic world, which still adopts the term paradidatic.