Sunday 21 September 2008

The Days of Print Are (almost) Over




Yesterday, whilst trawing through the stunningly massive content of the Scribd library/database, I found three e-books in PDF format of particular interest.

To me? absolutely, people at large but also, the 230 or so who form part of the "The Life Scientists" room over at FriendFeed.

Now, I've uploaded a few bits and bobs to Scribd, but until yesterday, had not properly searched the database. I found this (Scribd database) quite astonishing in terms of level/depth, and content generally.

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Being someone who is very interested in Glycobiology, that was what I threw into the Scribd engine.

Result was 102 at full article level.

What I found more interesting however was the fact that I was able to download some rather amazing resources which I simply had to alert others to and did so via FriendFeed. These were:-

1) Oxford Dictionary of Science Fifth Edition (893 pages - free PDF download)

2) 'Encyclopedic Reference of Genomics and Proteomics in Molecular Medicine' (2117 pages - free PDF)

and a drum roll please - thanks

3) 'The Reactome Book' - "A textbook of biological pathways" (3252 pages - free PDF)

Now of course, we should be talking quality not quantity and correctly so. That said, it didn't take long to virtually browse through this e-library and bookmark a few items of interest, not so much for myself I hasten to add, but to share with actual life scientists.

So, in the space of a couple of hours, that's ~ 7000 pages of quality text book material, shared to others. Cool.

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