You can read more about CourseSmart and the Iphone in “Textbooks Offered for iPod, iPhones” in the August 10 edition  of the Wall Street Journal (page B7). If you browse to the technology section of the Wall Street Journal Online, you will see a message that the article is only available to subscribers. However, members of the Poly community can read articles from the Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other newspapers by logging on with your Poly id number to the library’s ProQuest database.  (Also, curiously, there is currently much content available from the WSJ on the free Iphone app, including this article, that are not currently available free of charge on the website. That will probably change soon.)

From the publisher:

The march of Moore’s Law takes electronics to the molecular level, and indeed molecules are likely to be incorporated in future hybrid computer chips. This self-contained text guides students as well as professionals to the new possibilities presenting a treatment of Quantum Computing, a promising new approach which is based on Quantum Mechanics. This essential new title also covers topics which connect to alternative energy technology, for example solar cell design, photocatalytic conversion of water to hydrogen, and high performance batteries.

The author, Edward L. Wolf, is Professor of Physics at NYU-Poly. Professor Wolf’s experience ranges from teaching undergraduate courses to conducting industrial research. In 2007, Professor Wolf was honored with Polytechnic’s ”Jacobs Excellence in Education Award.” He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has authored over 100 refereed publications. The second edition of his successful textbook Nanophysics and Nanotechnology has been published recently.

Narrative artifacts exist not just in paper or parchment, but many other forms such as oracle bones from ancient China, an eight thousand year old rock painting from Africa, and papyrus fragments that were stuffed inside a mummified crocodile. Many items were once unreadable — charred by fire, damaged by chemicals, perhaps too fragile to unroll. New technologies now make it possible to decipher them. (more…)

Amazon plans to unveil on Wednesday a new  Kindle designed  especially for textbooks. The current Kindle e-reader has a  screen that is too small to display the photographs, charts  and graphs that are a prominent feature of many textbooks.  The new device should be more suitable for that, but how much more suitable is still under investigation.  In an  effort to determine how useful it might be as a textbook reader students at Case Western  University will be getting the new model with some textbooks  and course material pre-installed.

Members of the Poly community who have no interest in a portable  electronic reader, but would still like to occasionally check references online instead of heading to the shelves and thumbing through the table of contents, there are several outstanding reference resources available to you through our online databases. Books24×7, Knovel, and SpringerLink  feature thousands of full text books you can read via any web browser.

MIT plans to create a repository to make these open access articles available online.  For more details, read the full story on MIT’s The Tech.

This is great news for anyone who reads scholarly literature (and I’m guessing  you do since you are reading an academic library blog).  As publishers have raised subscription fees to databases over the years, library budgets have been stretched to the limit.  More support for open access takes the control of scholarship from the publishers and returns it to where it belongs - the scholars.

Read more posts about open access here.

Elsevier, a leading publisher of science and health information, developed SciTopics to offer authors a faster, more informal, dynamic, and interactive ways to publish their thinking on issues and highlight their research. The newly released tool takes advantage of the speed and interactivity of sharing information on the web, but it also addresses the problems of data overload and quality and accuracy of information. (more…)

The United States ranked number one with 2,959,661 papers and 42,269,694 citations.  The most cited article comes from the field of clinical medicine: “Mechanisms of disease: atherosclerosis – an inflammatory disease” (full text available in ProQuest).

In addition to clinical medicine, disciplines covered in the top 20 papers include: biochemistry, chemistry, physics, materials science and computer science.

ScienceWatch.com provides a behind-the-scenes look at the scientists, journals, institutions, nations, and papers selected by Essential Science Indicators.

You cannot print any book. Copyright laws govern what can be printed. The books must be out of copyright, or the copyright holder must give permission for reprinting. Files to be printed must be in pdf format. Thus far, thousands of books of varying origins have been printed. Some professors have ordered out of print textbooks to keep costs low for their students, some have ordered classics with their own handwritten notes in the margin.

This system takes advantage of two business models that have proven very successful on the Internet. The build to order model was a great part of Dell’s early success. The idea of the long tail, responsible for much of Amazon’s success, also plays into this: if you don’t have to worry about storage space, you can earn a lot of money by catering to niche interests.

You can read more about the Espresso Book Machine in  New Machines reproduce Custom Books on Demand appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle is one of the many publications available to the Poly community on the Dibner Library’s eBooks, EJournals page.  Type “textbooks” into the Polythinkers Pad search box to find more posts about the state of textbook publishing.

The journal seeks to provide a platform for novel ideas in database research surrounding biological information and will reportedly cover only open-access databases.

As described on the Oxford Journals web site:

Huge volumes of primary data are currently archived in numerous open-access databases, and with new generation technologies becoming more common in laboratories, large datasets will become even more prevalent than today. The archiving, curation, analysis and understanding of all of this data is a challenge.

(more…)

The Google deal will substantially increase the number of books available for online viewing, but it is only one of several initiatives that are expanding the universe of online books.  Also coming soon is Europeana, an online archive of not only books, but records, films, letters and other cultural treasures.   It will join collections like the Internet Archive, American Memory and Aluka in preserving the world’s cultural heritage and bringing portions of it to a greater audience. (more…)