#Educational publishers

[getmagicbox]

Discover EdTech 2025 Trends: A Must-Read for Educational Publishers!

The world of EdTech is evolving at lightning speed, and educational publishers are at the forefront of this revolution. Dive into our latest blog, What’s Next in EdTech: 2025 Trends in Digital Learning Every Educational Publisher Should Know, to explore groundbreaking trends shaping the future of education.

From AI-driven personalization to immersive learning experiences, this article unpacks actionable insights and strategies for embracing digital transformation in education. Stay ahead of the curve with a deep dive into tools, platforms, and innovations designed to empower educators, engage learners, and streamline content delivery.

EdTech Trends 2025

[vivaeducation]

CBSE Sample Papers for Class 10 2024-25

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In this article, we’ll show you how to use these resources effectively to make your exam prep easier and less stressful. Ready to take the first step?

[elearningmania]

Choosing a comprehensive digital course design platform can help educational publishers respond with agility to the changing needs of the education system and students.

[frontlistmedia]

Top 10 Publishers to Consider this Exam Season!

As the exam season approaches, students across the globe are gearing up for one of the most crucial periods in their academic journey. With the pressure mounting and the stakes high, it's essential to have the right study materials at hand to ace those exams. Thankfully, there are several top-notch publishers out there dedicated to providing comprehensive and reliable resources to help students succeed. Here's a rundown of the top 10 publishers you should consider this exam season:

Arihant Publishers: Known for their extensive range of study guides, practice papers, and reference books, Arihant Publishers have been a trusted name in the educational publishing industry for years. Their well-structured content and thorough coverage of various subjects make them a go-to choice for students preparing for competitive exams.

2. S Chand & Co Ltd: With a legacy spanning over seven decades, S Chand & Co Ltd has established itself as a leading publisher of educational books and materials. Their diverse catalog includes textbooks, guidebooks, and reference materials catering to students across different academic levels and disciplines.

3. Disha Publication: Disha Publication is synonymous with quality study materials and exam-oriented resources. From entrance exams to board exams, their books cover a wide array of subjects and topics, helping students build a strong foundation and excel in their exams.

4. Ramesh Publishing House: Ramesh Publishing House is renowned for its comprehensive study guides and practice sets for competitive exams. Their books are meticulously crafted to cover the syllabus effectively, making them an invaluable resource for aspirants preparing for various government job exams.

5. Lucent Publication: Specializing in general knowledge and objective-type questions, Lucent Publication is a trusted name among students preparing for competitive exams like UPSC, SSC, and banking exams. Their books are known for their clarity, conciseness, and relevance to exam patterns.

6. Upkar Prakashan: Upkar Prakashan is a leading publisher of study materials for competitive exams in India. With a focus on current affairs, general knowledge, and aptitude tests, their books help students stay updated and well-prepared for a wide range of exams.

7. Prabhat Prakashan: Prabhat Prakashan offers a diverse range of educational books covering subjects like history, geography, science, and mathematics. Their well-researched content and student-friendly approach make them a preferred choice among students and educators alike.

8. Mtg Learning Media: Mtg Learning Media is known for its comprehensive study guides and question banks for school exams, board exams, and competitive entrance exams. Their books are designed to enhance conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills among students.

9. Oswaal Books: Oswaal Books is synonymous with excellence in educational publishing, offering a wide range of study materials, question banks, and sample papers for CBSE, ICSE, and various competitive exams. Their books are crafted to provide students with a competitive edge and help them achieve academic success.

10. Dhanpat Rai Publications: Dhanpat Rai Publications, popularly known as D. R. Gupta Publications, is a trusted name in the field of educational publishing. Their books cover a wide range of subjects and are tailored to meet the specific requirements of students preparing for school exams, board exams, and competitive entrance exams.

As you embark on your exam preparation journey, consider these top 10 publishers to access high-quality study materials and resources that will help you succeed. Remember to choose materials that align with your exam syllabus and study preferences, and don't forget to supplement your preparation with regular practice and revision. With the right resources at your disposal, you'll be well-equipped to tackle any exam with confidence and achieve your academic goals.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.

Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be much cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem:

https://locusmag.com/2013/11/cory-doctorow-collective-action/

Musicians get royally screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in – a collective action problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google's mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn't have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

That's also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because it doesn't have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there'd be no Amazon, but it's impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up half of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

This is why one definition of "corruption" is a system with "concentrated gains and diffuse losses." The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can't possibly match the polluter's resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn "Chevron deference" and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that's not on fire):

https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/us-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-will-disrupt-climate-policy

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that's stable over long timescales, chances are you're looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that's the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that's saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their funding and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The "editorial process" the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They're not even typesetting the paper:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1

The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his dog appointed to the editorial boards of seven journals:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/olivia-doll-predatory-journals

Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions devoted to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier – the largest scholarly publisher – operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed "advertorial" papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090504075453/http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/

Naturally, academics and their institutions hate this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced eight years in prison for accessing a single paywalled academic paper:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online

And of course, there's Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed – but did not publish – papers from MIT's JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed 13 felonies. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals – which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions – because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published is top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work.

If academics could all agree to prioritize other journals for reading, then they could also prioritize other journals for submissions. If they could all prioritize other journals for submissions, they could all prioritize other journals for reading. Instead, they all hold one another hostage, through a wicked collective action problem that holds back science, starves their institutions of funding, and puts their colleagues at risk of imprisonment.

Despite this structural barrier, academics have fought tirelessly to escape the event horizon of scholarly publishing's monopoly black hole. They avidly supported "open access" publishers (most notably PLoS), and while these publishers carved out pockets for free-to-access, high quality work, the scholarly publishing cartel struck back with package deals that bundled their predatory "open access" journals in with their traditional journals. Academics had to pay twice for these journals: first, their institutions paid for the package that included them, then the scholars had to pay open access submission fees meant to cover the costs of editing, formatting, etc – all that stuff that basically doesn't exist.

Academics started putting "preprints" of their work on the web, and for a while, it looked like the big preprint archive sites could mount a credible challenge to the scholarly publishing cartel. So the cartel members bought the preprint sites, as when Elsevier bought out SSRN:

https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/17/disappointing-elsevier-buys-open-access-academic-pre-publisher-ssrn/

Academics were elated in 2011, when Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a shadow library that aims to make the entire corpus of scholarly work available without barrier, fear or favor:

https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra

Sci-Hub neutralized much of the collective action trap: once an article was available on Sci-Hub, it became much easier for other scholars to locate and cite, which reduced the case for paying for, or publishing in, the cartel's journals:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979

The scholarly publishing cartel fought back viciously, suing Elbakyan and Sci-Hub for tens of millions of dollars. Elsevier targeted prepress sites like academia.edu with copyright threats, ordering them to remove scholarly papers that linked to Sci-Hub:

https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/

This was extremely (if darkly) funny, because Elsevier's own publications are full of citations to Sci-Hub:

https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-linking-to-sci-hub-but-does-it-itself/

Meanwhile, scholars kept the pressure up. Tens of thousands of scholars pledged to stop submitting their work to Elsevier:

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Academics at the very tops of their fields publicly resigned from the editorial board of leading Elsevier journals, and published editorials calling the Elsevier model unethical:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research

And the New Scientist called the racket "indefensible," decrying the it as an industry that made restricting access to knowledge "more profitable than oil":

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/

But the real progress came when academics convinced their institutions, rather than one another, to do something about these predator publishers. First came funders, private and public, who announced that they would only fund open access work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7

Winning over major funders cleared the way for open access advocates worked both the supply-side and the buy-side. In 2019, the entire University of California system announced it would be cutting all of its Elsevier subscriptions:

https://www.science.org/content/article/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open

Emboldened by the UC system's principled action, MIT followed suit in 2020, announcing that it would no longer send $2m every year to Elsevier:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#nerdfight

It's been four years since MIT's decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier:

https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbundling-profiles/mit-libraries/

How are MIT's academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher's site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there's interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT's libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.

This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn't much!

https://unsub.org/

The MIT story shows how to break a collective action problem – through collective action! Individual scholarly boycotts did little to hurt Elsevier. Large-scale organized boycotts raised awareness, but Elsevier trundled on. Sci-Hub scared the shit out of Elsevier and raised awareness even further, but Elsevier had untold millions to spend on a campaign of legal terror against Sci-Hub and Elbakyan. But all of that, combined with high-profile defections, made it impossible for the big institutions to ignore the issue, and the funders joined the fight. Once the funders were on-side, the academic institutions could be dragged into the fight, too.

Now, Elsevier – and the cartel – is in serious danger. Automated tools – like the Authors Alliance termination of transfer tool – lets academics get the copyright to their papers back from the big journals so they can make them open access:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Unimaginably vast indices of all scholarly publishing serve as important adjuncts to direct access shadow libraries like Sci-Hub:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

Collective action problems are never easy to solve, but they're impossible to address through atomized, individual action. It's only when we act as a collective that we can defeat the corruption – the concentrated gains and diffuse losses – that allow greedy, unscrupulous corporations to steal from us, wreck our lives and even imprison us.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

[prokopetz]

The reason why we're suddenly seeing a bunch of indie video games – particularly American indie video games – using vintage music is because the US finally has a public domain in sound recordings.

For context, until 1972, there was no federal copyright regime in the US for sound recordings; intellectual property law for sound recordings was devolved to the individual states, meaning there were fifty different sets of rules that might apply to any given recording, and some states allowed sound recordings to be protected for an indefinite term – i.e., in essence, perpetual copyright without expiration.

What changed in 1972 was the Sound Recording Amendment, which established unified federal copyright on sound recordings for the first time, but which allowed any pre-existing state-level copyrights for sound recordings published prior to February 15th, 1972 to run for their full term. Since most state-level sound recording copyrights had no fixed term (see above), this was capped at the "publication plus 95 years" rule which applies to other federal copyrights – with the twist that the 95-year cap on previously perpetual sound recording copyrights would count from 1972, not from the date of publication.

This effectively meant that no sound recordings in the US would enter the public domain until February 15th, 2067 – which doesn't do anyone a whole lot of good right now!

Fast forward to 2018, when another piece of federal legislation, the Music Modernisation Act, was passed. Though this act was mainly concerned with streaming royalties and such, it also contained provisions to grandfather certain sound recordings into the public domain earlier than the Sound Recording Amendment's all-or-nothing 2067 deadline. Specifically:

On January 1st, 2022, all sound recordings published before 1923 would enter the public domain

Sound recording published from 1923 through 1946 will enter the public domain 100 years after the date of first publication

Sound recordings published from 1947 through 1956 will enter the public domain 110 years after the date of first publication

In practice, what this means is:

All sound recordings first published before 1923 entered the public domain last year, on January 1st, 2022;

This year, 2023, is a "gap year" in which no sound recordings enter the public domain (i.e., being the 100th and final year of protection for sound recordings first published in 1923); and

On January 1st of next year – that is, January 1st of 2024 – new batches of sound recordings will begin to enter the US public domain on a yearly basis for the first time in history, starting with sound recordings first published in 1923.

[envolvenuances]

mentioned Ibe in the previous post so in case anyone doesn't know him he is a doctor who makes medical illustrations showing black people.

and my personal favourite:

[jolteonmchale]

[isaacsapphire]

Banned books

The perennial topic, the regularly scheduled table of "banned books" at Borders and the public library.

The people who tell you that censorship is just sparkling repression unless it's done by a government tell you that a book is "banned" because one parent in Bumfuq, Kansas (population: 2436 if we count the prison) said they didn't want their 8 year old to be required to read it for a class they are legally required to attend, regardless of if this parent's objections were obeyed.

Meanwhile, what's not on the "banned books" table, because it isn't being printed (anymore), got "weeded" from the library, or otherwise isn't in the building because it don't fit the sociopolitical ideology of the people who assemble those displays?

Salman Rushdie books aside, has anything on that table ever been repressed by a government?

[threetrenchcoatsinatrenchcoat]

i don't like the term meta to refer to critical analysis of media around here, i feel like analyzing a piece of media as a piece of media is just like regular old 1st layer analysis? to me meta-analysis should be like analyzing analyses or something, and analyzing media at like watsonian 0th layer should be the exception

[amor-godess-of-love]

Ok but hear me out:

Proffesor Jonathan Crane helping his students pirate his own books, because screw his publishers.

No, but I can imagine Jonathan Crane showing his students ways to get they university books for free. Because he values education and thinks that learning textbooks should be at lest in affordable prices. That's probably ploblem he himself run into during his student years. Like he didn't mind buying the books, because he will read them later in life, but understands that's not probably something all other students will do or most won't even have money to afford it all.

I also imigine Jonathan Crane just hates his publisher, so he is happy to do something to irritate and annoyed them.

Self indulgence Oc bonus:

I imigine Jagna doing the same with her books for her students.

So she and Jonathan start a underground university club with few other proffesors that helps students get books for free. Like the whole "fight club" thing, just with books and keeping information from getting to university board.

Something Jonathan still looks foundly years later as he sits in Arkham.

I can even see Harley being part of this club, during her studies. This involvement, becoming something of inside joke for her and Crane. Like other rogues just wondering, in what organised crime the two are referencing between eachother. Like there is some illegal ring that no one knows about? That both Quinn and Crane were at the same time? What the hell is going on?

[getmagicbox]

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[poisonousquinzel]

Paul Dini: When we came up with the origin story for her, we put it out there that maybe she was not so good a person to begin with. Maybe in some ways she was manipulative, she took advantage of people, she cut corners. She was looking to profit off of these super criminals by writing a tell-all book. She was becoming a very surface-y pop psychologist and writing a tell-all book about the criminals of Gotham. When we took that attitude with her, it made it okay for her to fall under the Joker’s sway like that. Source

who let him say this? this is so nasty what the fuck is wrong with him

"When we took that attitude with her, it made it okay for her to fall under the Joker’s sway like that. " when we viewed her as a self serving slut who was only in it for the money it made it okay for her to be manipulated by joker like that :D

"She was becoming a very surface-y pop psychologist" BUT YOU DIDNT WRITE HER AS A PSYCHOLOGIST MOTHERFUCKER YOU WROTE HER AS A PSYCHIATRIST

i dont know who needs to hear this, but being a bad person or doing shady shit in your past does not mean you deserve to be abused and manipulated or that it makes it okay for your abuser to do what they do to you. that's a really gross thing to say about what he himself made as an abusive relationship.

[hussyknee]

Guys, Z-library is back up, but it desperately needs our help.

Z-Library is one of the largest online libraries in the world. We aim to make literature accessible to everyone. Today, Z-Library contains over 12,140,413 books and 84,837,000 articles Z-Library has many servers all over the world. Our stored data now totals more than 220 TB! Every month, millions of people use Z-Library for their purposes — and that means we are on the right track. But it will be difficult to achieve our goals without your help.

As you may know, almost all public domains of the library were blocked in November 2022 by order of the US Secret Service. The inner infrastructure of the project suffered some substantial damage too. Today, we are still under unprecedented pressure. At the moment, Z-Library is going through the hardest times in all the 14 years of its existence. The library might work with interruptions, and we ask you to be patient. Be sure – we are doing everything possible to provide free access to knowledge for millions of people across the globe, and we expect you to help us with that and to support us.

But despite all the difficulties, the library continues to function and develop. We have recently introduced several important features: the new recommendations section, comments to booklists, the new web-site menu, personal domains and Telegram Bot, and more.

Your active support gives strength to our Team and inspires to work. Each donated dollar is not only money for us, but it is also the confidence that you really need our project!

On 15 March 2023, as in March and September of each year, we launched additional fundraising to project maintenance and development. We will be extremely thankful for every dollar that will be donated. Furthermore, UNLIMITED downloads (for 1 month) are available for ALL contributors who will donate during the fundraising period. The fundraising will run until 1 April 2023

Millions of people use Z-Library every month for their purposes — this shows us that we are on the correct track. But it will be difficult to achieve our goals without your help.

Please consider making a donation.

I know there's a lot of discourse around book piracy right now, but you know who absolutely cannot afford to buy your books in dollars, afford the shipping fees, or don't have access/ travelling distance to the kind of fully stocked libraries you have in the West? The Global South. Our factories make your Kindles, your phones, your textbooks, and then we can't afford to buy them from your corps that sell them at around 300% grate price, and half the books are not even available for our region. Our universities don't get your funding or recognition, and when we do sell our personal possessions to get the money and work our asses off to get admittance to Western universities, y'all use us as grunts, exploit us and pass our work off as your own. Worse still, you buy out our local publishing houses and shut them down.

You cannot imagine the extent of global apartheid and colonial economic order that capitalism runs on. Amazon cheats you out of royalties? We can't even afford to buy your books. A dollar can buy someone a full dinner here. These sites – Z-lib, Internet Archive, Libgen, Open Library, Sci-Hub, PDF Drive, LibriVox – they are essential to granting the global majority our human right to knowledge, education and access. Z-Lib is by far the best one of them all.

You will first need to sign up to Z-Lib and access it through the private domain link they send you. It's a simple process, and every little bit counts. You're a leftist that believes in equal access for all? Then literally, put your money where your mouth is.

[bubblesandpages]

Does it mean anything that "the house is sentient" really picked up after 2020?

[quill-of-thoth]

History PSA for writing: prior to at minimum the mid to VERY LATE 1800's most things were made, or at least finished, by hand! If you have a character inspecting furniture in... for example fantasy ancient china... or the english regency... or fucking pseudomedieval times... marveling that they wouldn't have guessed something was made by hand, you have fucked up as an author on the research front.