Concept books ...

Why should cars get all the fancy concept models? Here are a few for the book:

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Via the wonderful Gizmodo. As noted in the comments there, most of the hardware to do this already exists, and many iPad apps are not too far away. What is impressive here is that elements of the work have been rethought to work in the digital medium. The none-sequential novel with parallel chapters accessable through motions is a fascinating idea. Interesting to think that a change in delivery format could affect the way literature is written.

Back to earth, here is a great example of taking something dry like a Library annual report and making it interesting and accessible with digital media.

How many unique papers in Mendeley?

Interesting blog post by Duncan Hull (who works on the Genome Campus in Hinxton):

Mendeley is a handy piece of desktop and web software for managing and sharing research papers [1]. This popular tool has been getting a lot of attention lately, and with some impressive statistics it’s not difficult why. At the time of writing Mendeley claims to have over 36 million papers, added by just under half a million users working at more than 10,000 research institutions around the world. That’s impressive considering the startup company behind it have only been going for a few years. The major established commercial players in the field of bibliographic databases (WoK and Scopus) currently have around 40 million documents, so if Mendeley continues to grow at this rate, they’ll be more popular than Jesus (and Elsevier and Thomson) before you can say “bibliography”. But to get a real handle on how big Mendeley is we need to know how many of those 36 million documents are unique because if there are lots of duplicated documents then it will affect the overall head count.

He then does an experiment, with intriguing results.

Thanks to Lorcan for the link.