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