And this accurately reflects the raison d'être of the ISBN -- it is an identifier that identifies individual products. The EPUB, the PDF and the MOBI are all different products (even if they all have the same content), and may be available from
different suppliers, priced differently, exclusively sold through different outlets, readable on different devices etc. Other identifiers (like the so far not widely used ISTC) can be used to collocate multiple products with essentially the same content.
And as Laura correctly points out, publishers assign ISBNs, primarily in order to facilitate trading of books among their trading partners. For physical books, this is a well-understood system. For e-books, not so much: some trading partners don't
insist on ISBNs, others do. Others still can allocate ISBNs* if the publisher does not. And a few rely internally on proprietary identifiers†.
Best e-book practice on this is pretty clear these days, but actual practice among publishers still varies.
Now for Schlomo's MARC records, it's quite understandable that some have no ISBN and others have multiple ISBNs, since the MARC record is not bound to a particular 'product' quite as closely as a ISBN. Having said this, I do find the nearly 40% without
ISBNs a bit surprising -- are serial publications or other items that would not be eligible for ISBNs included in the sample?
Graham Bell
EDItEUR
* that is, the retailer can in theory allocate an ISBN if the publisher does not -- though in practice I don't think many retailers do this.
† like 'proprietary EANs' (special GTIN-13s reserved for internal use only), or ASINs within Amazon. Because of their proprietary nature, I suspect these aren't much value in a library record
EDItEUR Limited is a company limited by guarantee, registered in England no 2994705. Registered Office: United House, North Road, London N7 9DP, UK. Website:
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On 5/20/13 7:49 AM, Laura Dawson wrote:
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Karen, at the ISBN Agency we've discovered that this is not consistent. Amazon doesn't supply an ISBN - the publisher does. And many publishers don't bother assigning an ISBN to their mobi files, because it's not a requirement at Amazon. BN/Nook assigns
a proprietary EAN if no ISBN is provided by the publisher. Best practice dictates that different formats receive unique ISBNs, but many publishers don't adhere to that.
The number soars, but not consistently.
Another interesting piece of data:
For eBooks, if they are distributed by different vendors (Amazon v. iTunes, etc.), each VENDOR provides a different ISBN. So the exact same thing gets more than one ISBN. Also, every different eBook format from the same vendor is supposed to have a different
ISBN: PDF, ePub, Mobi, etc. So as we go more digital, the number of ISBNs expands soars!
kc
On 5/20/13 7:05 AM, David Weinberger wrote:
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Is this information from Mac Elrod and Shlomo Sanders the frequency of ISBNs publicly bloggable? It's very interesting.
- David Weinberger
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Karen Coyle
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m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
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Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet