Via Outsell/Insights, I read that the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers last week held its Book 2.01 Seminar in London as part of the London Book Fair. The event set out to examine where STM publishers are heading with their e-book strategies, and to look at where future developments might lead.

One of the speakers, Professor Martin Hofmann-Apitius, of the Fraunhofer Institut for Algorithms and Scientific Computing, talked about scientists´ use of book content and about the innovative applications his institution has produced to interpret chemical resonance structure diagrams in scanned text in a way that can then be used for experimentation.

There was discussion about making books available through routes that have traditionally been used by researchers to find journal articles. This year many more e-book chapters may start to be indexed by Pubmed, Scopus and other abstracting and indexing services, bringing together book and journal content where researchers can find and use it. “Good news for researchers”, according to Outsell/Insights.

The Book 2.01 presentations are available from the association’s website.