Textbooks play an important role in the development of China's publishing industry, with broad prospect and vast market. However, challenges persist, such as serious homogenization of bibliographies and frequent infringement of substantive similarity. These issues highlight the lack of systematic planning in the textbook publishing sector, resulting in the dilemma of limited quantity of high-quality textbook and intense market, and placing textbook publishers in a huge risk of infringement. Compared with general books, textbooks have special characteristics, which makes the identification of substantive similar infringement difficult, such as high professionalism, unclear boundary and complicated standard. It is necessary to sort out and summarize the adjudication rules formed in judicial practice in order to clarify the criteria for determining material similar infringement in the publication of textbook. Analyses of relevant judicial cases reveals that courts mainly review the material similar infringement of textbook from two aspects: overall structure and content arrangement. In terms of the overall structure, the most intuitive way to judge whether the two books are substantively similar is to compare their catalogues. In the process of catalogue comparison, courts have roughly formed two judgment ideas. One is to judge only the textual expression of the catalog itself, and the other is to examine and judge the text after the catalog and subheadings. Considering the dependency and consistency of the compilation of textbook, courts are more cautious when determining the substantive similarity of the overall structure, mainly in the following two exceptions. First, when judging whether there are substantive similarities in the whole textbooks involved in the case, various normative outlines belonging to the public domain should be excluded. Second, considering whether there is an indispensable reference for the similarity of the overall structure, if the teaching auxiliary books only use the catalog style of the corresponding textbook, and the content is different, it does not belong to the material similarity infringement. From the content arrangement, the determination of substantive similar infringement mainly examines the proportion of similar content, the originality of similar content, the source of similar content and other factors. In order to effectively reduce the substantial similar infringement risk in the textbook publishing and improve the risk prevention ability in the whole chain, publishers should accurately select comparison objects at the front end. Key comparison categories include: classic books with identical or similar titles published earlier, books that other publishers of the same type have obtained exclusive publishing rights, and reference books listed in books to be published. Publishers need to establish reasonable review standards in the middle end, so as to clarify the comparison of the overall structure and content arrangement, and present effective defenses when facing infringement disputes in the back end. In infringement disputes, the publisher should properly preserve the materials formed in the judgment of substantive similar review, or defend the material similar infringement that has exceeded its professional review level, thereby enhancing the risk response capability to protect their own rights and interests.