New England BioLabs tops the catalog category this year, with a product that the creators and users alike call handy and informative. "We've worked to hard to make sure our catalog maintains a healthy balance between being a catalogue and being a reference guide," says NEB marketing director Peter Nathan. "It has high-end technical info of the caliber of the latest molecular biology textbooks." In fact, he says, "99% of the questions asked of technical support" can be answered from the reference section.
Kristin Ostrow, a postdoc at University of California, San Francisco, has been using the NEB catalog as a molecular cloning reference "for most of my scientific career. When we joined the lab, it was the first gift [our boss] would give us," she says. Nathan says university course instructors request thousands of copies annually for their students. He attributes the company's success in part to the fact ...
