Getting Rid of Toxic E-Trash? Dump it on Asia's Poor

On a recent Chris Matthews Show the host asked his guests to "Tell me something I don't know." Rick Stengel, managing editor for Time Magazine, said, "By the end of the year you're going to see a plethora of e-readers - of post-Kindle devices - four color."

For those of you who have been keeping up with e-books Stengel didn't tell us anything we don't know. But here's something that nobody knows: when the next generation of e-readers arrives, what's going to happen to the Kindle or Sony E-Reader you replace?

If what's happening in Europe is any guideline, it will end up in a toxic e-waste landfill in Asia and Africa where the destitute, many of them children, will scavenge it for scrap. These scavengers incur horrifying and often fatal skin, lung, intestinal and reproductive organ ailments from the plastics, metals and gases that go into discarded cell phones, televisions, computers, keyboards, monitors, cables and similar e-scrap. Elizabeth Rosenthal, covering the story for the New York Times, tells us that "Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa.

"There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming."

Jessika Toothman, blogging on HowStuffWorks, describes how "A whole bouquet of heavy metals, semimetals and other chemical compounds lurk inside your seemingly innocent laptop or TV. E-waste dangers stem from ingredients such as lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, copper, beryllium, barium, chromium, nickel, zinc, silver and gold." In fact if you want to see what this "bouquet" of poisons is doing to your fellow man, woman and child, you can view this sickening video of a Chinese e-trash village.

One device not mentioned in Toothman's list of e-waste is e-book readers. The obvious reason is that we are still in the first generation of e-book devices (or second if you count progenitors like the Rocket Book) and there haven't been enough readers manufactured to make them a formidable source of trash like cell phones and TVs. But when the next generation of e-book readers floods us with Kindle and Sony rivals - better, cheaper, faster, more colorful, loaded with special features and options - will we simply add them to the tons of lethal junk earmarked for miserable dumps in China, Indonesia or Africa?

Because it is still young, the e-book industry has an unprecedented opportunity to exercise its social responsibility, as we recently pointed out. Here is a three-point program to make sure the e-books business remains green.

• First, manufacturers must be compelled to disclose the chemical components of the e-book devices they produce so that we can evaluate environmental hazards.
• Second, Amazon, Sony, Plastic logic, Philips and other developers must develop programs for either returning their devices for safe (and monitored) disassembly and recycling or for donation to students, armed services personnel and other charitable recipients.
  
• And third, The cost of recycling and safely disassembling e-books must be built into the price structure of e-books.

Right now the hidden cost of computers and other electronic devices is human suffering. It is unacceptable for the e-book industry to boast about environmental advantages while secretly sticking the helpless poor with the bill or contributing to the poisoning of the world's water and air. If safety measures and sensible recycling add $25 or $50 to the price of their devices, that is an acceptable tradeoff. Because it would be assessed equally on all manufacturers, none would have a competitive advantage over its rivals.

We expect the e-book industry to do the right thing.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Are Subtitles Necessary?

Agents and publishers spend a lot of time creating subtitles. In fact, if you were to measure how many man- and woman-hours go into the process you would say they spend an inordinate amount of time in these deliberations. I say "deliberations" but as often as not they are debates, and some of them turn into donnybrooks with noses bent far out of shape and people not talking to each other. Publishing folks take subtitles seriously, and we advise you to do the same.

There is a lot at stake. A confusing or amorphous title desperately needs to be sharpened and focused with the help of a handful of explanatory words. But subtitles are not merely any words. They have to be perfect words.
Subtitles are not composed so much as they are distilled like acid so that every syllable etches an indelible impression in the mind of a customer gazing at a stack of books. A word out of place can well mean a sale lost.

Though subtitles are usually worked out in a dialogue between editor and author, the influence of the publisher's sales representatives is always in the room. The question What the hell does the title mean? coming from a sales rep is a command to go back and come up with a better one.

These remarks are prompted by a blog by Robert McCrum in London's Guardian.co.uk urging publishers to drop subtitles altogether. McCrum is incensed that the publisher of John Carey's biography of William Golding felt compelled to add this subtitle: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.

McCrum waxes positively bilious over the spineless editorial crew that came up with that one. "Picture the scene at Faber & Faber," he writes. "Carey's manuscript has been delivered, and the book is in production. Then, at some routine sales meeting, the worm of doubt starts to creep in. Up pops some bright young spark. Excuse me, says the BYS, I'm not sure that some of our younger readers will actually know who William Golding is. I mean, he's been, like, dead since 1993, and most of his books are out of print." The fact that Golding won a Nobel Prize for Literature and his masterpiece is required reading at countless colleges does not seem to have assured the publisher that readers will identify him without having to be hammered on their heads.

That's why McCrum wants to do away with subtitles entirely. "The truth is, if you have to justify your book with a subtitle, the game is up," he says. "Buyers pay scant attention to them; librarians and bibliographers often forget to catalogue them. They linger only as fig leaves of authorial shame. Who now remembers, or cares, that George Orwell's Animal Farm bears the subtitle A Fairy Tale, or that Herman Melville's Moby Dick was also known as The Whale?"

Author and English professor Ben Yagoda agrees with McCrum. In 2005 he published an article on the subject for the New York Times Book Review section. "Nobody really notices subtitles," he wrote. "They are a sort of lottery ticket in the economics of nonfiction book marketing. Publishers throw all kinds of elements in them - vogue words and phrases, features of the book the title didn't get around to mentioning, talismanic locutions like 'An American Life' - in the (almost always) vain hope that something will pay off." In fact he thinks the convention has become a crutch for publishers: "What's changed recently is that the subtitle has been asked to bear ever more weight. So many books are published nowadays that each one needs to proclaim its own merits; and with advertising budgets shaved away to nothing, the task falls to subtitles. As a result, they have become ubiquitous, hyperbolic and long... Once you've read the cover of 'Shadow Divers: The True Adventures of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II', is there really any need to crack open the book?"

On the other hand, some subtitles dare you to resist cracking open the book. I'm thinking of The Bad Guys Won! by Jeff Pearlman. He follows that title with a veritable millipede of a sub: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball With Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put On a New York Uniform, and Maybe the Best. We dare any sports fan to pass that one by without at least picking it up.

If you think today's subtitles are long and convoluted, read Yagoda's The Subtitle That Changed America and discover some historical predecessors (including the one for Robinson Crusoe pictured above) that cannot be uttered in a single breath. You will also match the following book subtitles to titles:

• The Story of a Man of Character
• The Ambiguities
• A Novel Without a Hero
• The Modern Prometheus
• Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
• A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
• A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
• Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

After a recent bruising negotiation with an author over trimming his 22 word subtitle, I definitely agree with Yagoda's conclusion: "I miss the time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a book to go out into the world with only a strong title followed by a few hundred pages of outstanding writing."

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

A Corporate Colossus That Loves Dogs

In judging people it's often helpful to divide them into dog people or cat people. Can you characterize corporations the same way?

Since you probably haven't read Google's Code of Conduct you will not be aware that Google is a dog company. The preface to the Code's dog policy states,"Google's affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture.We like cats, but we're a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out."

Though you could argue for hours about the natures of cats and dogs, animal-lovers instinctively understand what Google means when it says it's a dog company. Most of us think of domesticated dogs as friendly, sociable, trustworthy and happy to serve mankind. For that reason, when Google declares "Don't be evil" as its guiding principle we're inclined to give it more credence than if it were the slogan of a company that behaved more unpredictably and deviously - a cat company, in other words.

Wicked?

It must be deeply distressing to Google's management to be characterized by its critics as wicked. That epithet and variations on it have recently been alleged in response to Google's aggressive initiative to digitize the world's inventory of out of print books. "Years after cracking the very code of the Web to lucrative ends," writes the New York Times's David Carr, "Google may be in the midst of trying to conjure the most complicated algorithm yet: to wit, can goodness, or at least a stated intention not to be evil, scale along with the enterprise?" Carr's article is entitled How Good (or Not Evil) Is Google?

Note that Carr distinguishes between a mandate to do good and one not to do evil. The two are vastly different from one another. Hippocrates drew the distinction in his instructions to physicians: "As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least to do no harm." There are also two strikingly contrasting expressions of the Golden Rule: one is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The other: "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man."

Google's mission is phrased in the negative: Don't be evil rather than Do good. Why? One reason might be credibility: we tend to doubt the probity of do-gooders. But the struggle to avoid evil is universal; everybody roots for those who strive to resist temptation.

The Code

Just what does Google mean by "evil"? I'm reminded of a story about President Calvin Coolidge, a notoriously taciturn man. One Sunday as he left church a reporter asked him what the minister's sermon was about. Coolidge said "Evil." "What did the minister say about evil?" the reporter pressed. "He was against it," Coolidge replied.

It's easy to be against evil until you're asked to define it. But here's the interesting thing about Google: it does defines it. It defines it in the 15 single spaced pages of its Code of Conduct.

Here's a statement from the Preface:

The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put "Don't be evil" into practice. It's built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. We set the bar that high for practical as well as aspirational reasons: Our commitment to the highest standards helps us hire great people, who then build great products, which in turn attract loyal users. Trust and mutual respect among employees and users are the foundation of our success, and they are something we need to earn every day.

Among the provisions of the Code are positions on integrity, respect, privacy, freedom of expression, drugs and alcohol, co-worker relationships, gifts, expenses, anti-bribery, confidentiality, insider trading and yes...dogs. The spirit of the document is not unlike that of the honor codes of some colleges like Haverford College or West Point. Employees are expect to read the Code thoroughly and not only to be aware of its requirements but to make sure vendors, licensees and others adhere to them as well.

Because the Code of Conduct is educational, entertaining and even inspiring, from time to time we'll excerpt some of its provisions and discuss them.

Is Scale Sinful?

It's not likely that Google's critics have read the Code, because the sin they seem to be accusing Google of - "Do not grow huge" - appears nowhere in the document. The Times's Carr puts his finger on it when he wonders whether goodness can be scaled up. Once a company becomes big can it any longer do good? Or is there one rule for large enterprises and another for small ones?

It might help to look at a small one that does the same thing as Google, Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg has been digitizing out of print books for decades. Employing volunteer labor, financed by contributions and offering its editions free or at low cost, it has functioned without raising an eyebrow since its startup in 1971. It boasts a catalog of nearly 30,000 free books and tens of thousands more available through partners and affiliates. Has anyone accused Project Gutenberg of overweening greed or untrammeled ambition?

Nobody that we're aware of.

Google on the other hand has scanned and digitized a staggering number of books, somewhere in the millions. The sheer dimension of the enterprise provokes anxiety, suspicion and jealousy. And, unlike Project Gutenberg, Google is doing it to make money, which only magnifies the hostility toward it.

So - is it possible that evil is simply a function of scale? Can Google continue to do good when, to use Shakespeare's phrase, it bestrides the world like a colossus?

How Big Is Colossal?

Those who think that iniquity is a function of size will find plenty of ammunition when they take Google's measurements. According to the investor relations page on its website, Google's 2008 gross revenues were $21.795 billion. Using statistics provided by the World Bank, that placed Google ahead of the gross national product of 90 other nations including Bolivia ($16.674 billion), Jamaica ($15.068 billion), Afghanistan ($10.170 billion) and Bermuda ($5.855 billion). In fact, Google's gross revenues were higher than the gross national products of the bottom 28 nations on the World Bank's list combined!

With resources like that at its command, a corporation bent on evil could wreak a great deal of havoc. It could finance militias, undermine governments, build arsenals. The news gives us no assurance that corporations are benign. How many companies brandish meaningless mottoes while exploiting, plundering and corrupting? It's easier to be cynical about Google's intentions than to believe that they are sincere. But - is it possible that just this once, a capitalistic behemoth will put its money where its mouth is?

E-Reads has no corporate ties to Google. But we are heavily dependent on them, and we'd be amazed if you were not as well. I certainly would feel better knowing that the company that brings me gmail, Chrome, AdWords, Picasa, Android, Blogger, Google Maps, and YouTube is not evil. Wouldn't you? Read Google's Code of Conduct and reflect.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Of Course You're Struggling! Nobody's Buying FIC033000 Any More. (All About BISAC Codes)

Next time you're at a party and someone asks you what kind of books you write, tell them "Oh, mostly FIC027050 and FIC027070 but occasionally I do some FIC027120 for a change of pace." And if you really want to impress them, tell them you're working on a FIC009020.

Unless your interlocutor knows the code, you'll get nothing but a blank stare. But if he or she speaks BISAC, you might end up getting topped with, "That's all well and good, but I'm working on a FIC043000."

Anybody got a BISAC decoder ring?

BISAC is an acronym for a system of code numbers developed by Book Industry Standards and Communications, a standing committee of a larger organization mandated to develop standards in a wide variety of areas. Some of them deal with things you may never have thought about. Luckily, the BISAC people have thought a lot about them. If for instance you were a bookstore clerk or warehouse picker and packer a few decades ago, you wouldn't have a clue as to which side of a carton the label went on, how large should the label be, and what part of the store to stock the books in when they came out of the box. BISAC addressed those problems and developed standards for uniform barcoding, product and shipping labels, pallet headers, and many more tasks in the supply chain, saving the industry untold man- and woman-hours.

BISAC also created a subject headings list code designed to help publishers, booksellers, librarians and other book industry trading partners to store, shelve and display books by topic. When they're preparing a book for publication, publishers select a general category into which any given title fits, then picks the subcategory. It's the book equivalent of Linnaeus's "genus" and "species". Some samples of genus are "Biography and Autobiography", "Crafts and Hobbies", "History" and "Health and Fitness". There are so many broad categories that in order to keep its database from whirling off into space, BISAC divided them in two, A-J and K-Z. You can click here to see the first half.

You'll note that one of the major categories is "Fiction", and if you'd like to settle down for the evening with a novel, BISAC offers you about one hundred categories. For instance, if it's African-American fiction you can select among:

FIC049000 FICTION / African American / General
FIC049010 FICTION / African American / Christian
FIC049020 FICTION / African American / Contemporary Women
FIC049030 FICTION / African American / Erotica
FIC049040 FICTION / African American / Historical
FIC049050 FICTION / African American / Mystery & Detective
FIC049060 FICTION / African American / Romance
FIC049070 FICTION / African American / Urban Life

In the scenario with which we launched our discussion, you informed the individual at the party that you write historical romances and Regencies, but occasionally write paranormals, and you're currently working on an epic fantasy. The BISAC-savvy author who one-upped you told you he's writing a coming-of-age novel. And the struggling author in the headline of this article? He writes westerns.

In a recent posting we said your book's life and your writing career depended on ISBN numbers. The same might well be said about BISAC headings. Without them, bookstores would be pure chaos (or purer chaos than they are now).

I hope this has been helpful. And now if you'll excuse me I'm dying to get back to my FIC002000.

Richard Curtis

PS: Be careful not to say "BISAC" to an MD. Bisacodyl, whose medical nickname is "Bisac", is a stimulant laxative.

Publisher Sics Leakseeking Dick in Teddy Bio Embargo Imbroglio

This story appeared in the New York Times on September 3, 2009, eleven days before publication of True Compass by the late Senator Ted Kennedy: "Despite the press embargo of Ted Kennedy's upcoming memoir, the NY Times has published an article looking at a leaked copy of the highly-anticipated autobiography."

Did you know there was an embargo on Kennedy's book? Do you know why its publisher, Twelve, a division of Hachette, required it? How it was supposed to be enforced? Who leaked it and why? Was the Times in breach of, um, embargo? And is that a crime, like rum-running?

As to the latter question, Hachette thinks the transgression was flagrant enough to merit hiring a private detective to learn how the Times got its hands on copies of the book, which enabled the paper not only to extract the marrow for its readers but to run a review as well - a review of a book that nobody (except Times reporters, apparently) would be able to purchase for another eleven days. (Today is the officially publication day and here is the link to the Times's review.)

A Breach of Manners or a Crime?

We know what an embargo is when we talk about sanctions against rogue nations. But...books?

The term is used in a number of publishing industry contexts, and they all revolve around a date before which release of information, excerpts or copies of a book could be harmful to a publisher's interests. For instance, there are embargos on serialization of book texts in newspapers and magazines, on early reviews, and on sale of copies before the official release date.

In some instances the constraint is simply moral: "Please don't spoil the book's plot by reviewing it two weeks before publication date." A book's sales may be negatively impacted by a trigger-happy reviewer but not so badly damaged as to warrant legal action. There's little a publisher can do about it except yell at the reviewer and his newspaper. The breach is one of manners.

In other cases the transgression is legal, the flouting of a contractual covenant. The New York Times figured incidentally in such a case when an online bookseller and a distributor placed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on sale days before the embargo was to end. Several papers including the New York Times ran reviews jumping the official gun. According to Emily Shurr of cnet News Blog, the book's publisher, Scholastic, brought a lawsuit against the companies claiming that "This breach led The New York Times and Baltimore Sun to lawfully claim that copies of the book could be obtained at a public retail outlet before publishing their book reviews, which included details considered spoilers."

The Biggest Embargo of All

The issues raised by these incidents are about to become incandescent as we count down the hours until publication on September 15th of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, which has been cloaked in paranoiac secretiveness. Motoko Rich, who covers the New York Times's book beat, writes that "Nobody at Special Ops Media," the outfit hired to design the book's Web marketing campaign, "has been allowed to read the book..."

Even the most powerful figure in book retailing jumped into the embargo game, Rich reports:

Last week Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, posted a breathless memo to customers on the Amazon.com home page, informing them that the company was taking 'one of the most anticipated publishing events of all time' very seriously. 'We’ve agreed to keep our stockpile under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure, with two locks requiring two separate people for entry,' Mr. Bezos wrote.

Who Dunnit?

Friction between publishers and review media over early release of a book's contents has been an age-old issue for as long as anyone can remember. On several occasions a publisher would license first (pre-publication) serial rights, only to discover the information in a tabloid well in advance of serialization. It seems that the publisher had also sent review copies to those tabloids which, under the pretext of "reviewing" the book, revealed everything, rendering those first serial rights worthless. Needless to say, the magazine that had bought those rights fair and square demanded its money back.

When you realize how many people see a book before publication, it's a small miracle that information blackouts ever work. Agents, editors, publishing executives, copy editors, proofreaders, sales representatives, marketing department managers, publicity people, cover designers, ad copywriters, even clerks feeding manuscripts into the copy machine, all have an opportunity to squeal and even to smuggle, and that doesn't even include bookstore buyers who need to read something in order to know how many copies to order, or reviewers who always appreciate having something to review on publication day. Though I never was able to confirm it, back in the '80s it was said that an employee of a photocopy shop used by a big literary agency could be paid off to make an extra copy of a hot new novel for movie studios hoping to get an early look.

It is about as easy to impose an embargo in the book business as it is to keep a secret in a beauty parlor. If the contents of a book get prematurely out of the bag we have no one to blame but the porous system known as book publishing. If The Lost Symbol remains under wraps until the embargo is removed, it will be the best kept secret since Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe in World War II.

Me? I've got my money on the spoilers.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the New York Observer.

Learning to Love Your ISBN Number

Michael Cairns, whose Personanondata blog covers the book industry, has declared that "The ISBN Is Dead".

Do you care?

It will come as no surprise to hear you say you don't. Is that because you're not sure you understand what ISBNs are? Would it make a difference if we told you your book's life and your writing career depended on them? If so, tarry a moment to consider them.

The acronym ISBN - commonly pronounced "IS-bin" in publishingese - stands for International Standard Book Number. Like a Social Security number, it a unique identifier not just for a book but for each edition of a book. Publishing companies purchase a block of ISBNs and, after assigning them to each edition of your book, register them with R.R. Bowker. "Bowker is the U.S. ISBN Agency in the United States," we are told by the ISBN official website, "responsible for assigning ISBNs as well as providing information and advice on the uses of the ISBN system to publishers and the publishing industry in general."

Once your publisher has assigned ISBN numbers to books, it produces bar codes that facilitate handling, shipping, stocking, selling, returning and every other business transaction pertaining to various editions of each book. The hardcover will have one number, the trade paperback another, the mass market paperback another, and the audio edition yet another.

This Linnean-type taxonomy was introduced in the UK and US in the late 1960s and accepted as an International Standard in 1970. It has proven a godsend to publishers, booksellers, authors, and even to readers, though the latter may not be aware of how much easier their lives have been made by the puzzling string of numbers printed in the front matter of books they purchase or by the bar codes on the cover.

The ISBN is 10 digits long, or rather has been up to recently,when the publishing industry adopted a changeover to 13 digits to tie in with bar code standards ("EAN") used to identify a all sorts of products.

Abebooks points out that there are four components of the 10 digits on your book's bar code:

Group - identifies a country, area or language area. Some publishers form language areas or regional units.

Publisher – pinpoints the specific publisher within a group. It usually designates the exact identification of the publishing house and its address.

Title - designates a particular edition of a publication of a specific publisher.

Check Digit - relies on a mathematical calculation with a modulus 11. If the check digit is "10", an "X" is used instead. The check digit helps verify the validity of an ISBN.

A 13-digit ISBN includes the same numbers as in a 10-digit ISBN with the addition of a 3 digit EAN prefix of either "978" or "979". For example: 978-1-873671-00-9.

Now that you're an expert on ISBNs, you may wish to delve into the ISBN Users Manual or the website of the US ISBN Agency and soak up all those delicious details.

Whether you do or not, perhaps you're beginning to feel a glimmer of affection for ISBNs and anxiety about Michael Cairns's assertion that they're dead. What's he getting at?

For one thing, he says, "The ISBN in its current form may not be sufficient to support the migration to a digital world." The past decade has witnessed a profusion of e-book formats from the Rocket Book and its cousin the SoftBook to Palm Pilot, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, Sony eReader, cell phones and others. Each format requires its own ISBN, requiring publishers to register as many as seven or eight of them plus additional ones for print and audio editions. It's a huge clerical and bookkeeping headache for publishers and no inconsequential expense, either, for ISBNs don't grow on trees.

Note that I didn't list the Kindle among the multiplicity of e-book formats, and that leads to another issue for Cairns. Some suppliers, he observes, "don't see the ISBN as relevant." Key among them is Amazon, which disdains ISBNs in favor of its own identifier, the "ASIN". He is bluntly critical of Amazon's actions, saying "they have polluted the supply chain with these numbers." Other newcomers to the publishing business have gotten on the no-ISBN bandwagon, too, creating the potential for chaos akin to pre-EU Europe with its multiplicity of languages, currencies, tolls, taxes and customs restrictions.

Cairns feels it's urgent to round up all these wild horses and get them back into the ISBN corral. "If we shrug our collective shoulders to these issues, this non-action will set a precedent from which we as a publishing industry will be unable to recover."

The ISBN standard united the industry from author royalty statement to store shelf and, while I emphasize the ISBN is far from dead, there are sufficient warning signs to suggest that the ISBN may be unable to thrive in the 21st century as it has over the past 40 yrs. As a community, we need to recognize that the ISBN may not be meeting its intended market need and that the future may make this deficiency even more stark. From an international perspective, ISO could help by reconvening a partial (or full) revision of the standard; it seems incompatible with the speed at which all industry changes that we can continue to live with a 10 year revision cycle. In my view, ISBN could benefit from an accelerated revision cycle while the result of non-action could be increasing irrelevance.

Read The ISBN Is Dead in its entirety. Then open to the front matter of the book you're reading, fix your eyes on the ISBN and think, "This is somebody's child."

Richard Curtis