The ISBN is dead
By Michael Cairns, former President, Bowker
Related: September 15 Webcast on the future of ISBNs. – D.R.
In its current form the ISBN is not yet dead—I’m a big supporter—but therein lies the problem: “in its current form.” What about its future health?
To gain entry to the supply chain, most small and medium-sized publishers will continue to buy their ISBNs from agencies around the world as they have since the 1970’s. In contrast, most large publishers have reservoirs of ISBNs sufficient to last almost forever and only occasionally buy new prefixes to establish new imprints. Small wonder that ISBNs have been the topic of many a debate among sophisticated industry insiders.
Five years ago, I participated in the once-a-decade ISO ISBN revision process that resulted in the current ISBN standard. (Michael Healy ran this two year process on behalf of ISO).
That revision included the expansion from 10 to 13 digits, but this was tame compared to the contentious issue of separate ISBNs for every eBook format.
I support this position—although I did not have a vote in the revision—and agreed with others who viewed assigning separate ISBNs as consistent with the way ISBNs had historically been assigned to other title formats.
Despite the passage of time, this issue continues to generate significant comment and has become, to me, one of several indications that the ISBN in its current form may not be sufficient to support the migration to a digital world.
A second problem the ISBN faces is driven by some down-stream suppliers who don’t see the ISBN as relevant. The most prominent (egregious—pick your label) of these has been Amazon—and this is not just because no Kindle title carries an ISBN.
Amazon has long been disdainful of the ISBN and, almost from the opening of the bookstore, it assigned "ASINs" to books. In his defining Web 2.0 article, Tim O’Reilly used the example of Amazon’s ASIN as an indicator of Amazon’s application of the principles of Web 2.0. At the time (while I was at Bowker in 2005), I took a more sanguine view in an email:
Amazon’s ASIN creation was built out of expediency. If they received a title from a publisher that (for whatever reason) had no ISBN, they assigned a number just so they could get it in their system. (Don’t laugh, we get frantic calls from publishers who are at their printer and don’t have a number). At first they were designating these as “ISBN”s which we had them change. There was never an intention to take ISBN and make something better and different. So while I would agree on your point about extending the bibliographic content, in the case of ASINs Amazon were not looking to create additional value or take the identifier to some other more valuable place: they needed 10 digits to identify a SKU. Now they have polluted the supply chain with these numbers. No other vendor has seen a requirement to create their own SKUs; there has never been a need, because the ISBN has been the most effective product identifier ever established.
Hence, at Amazon, the lack of ISBNs on Kindle titles isn’t really new; although it was a fairly rare occurrence (albeit from a very large player). Others now new to the supply chain (including suppliers of print-on-demand titles) have decided not to use ISBNs. Some of these suppliers are using the Google Book settlement titles as their ‘inventory’ and thus, by definition, this issue becomes a significant challenge to the ubiquity of the ISBN.
A third issue concerns the rapid influx of new titles as a result of digitization programs. At this point, it’s unknown whether any of these titles will be subsequently broken down into parts, (although this seems inevitable,) but that further compounds the issue of how ISBNs – or other identifiers – will identify this content.
Some may argue that, as the supply chain compacts the connection between producer and supplier becomes tighter and a specific item identifier isn’t required. Maybe that’s true; however, I believe it’s far too early in the transition to digital content to make this judgment. Unfortunately, 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 years.
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.
Into this mix I would also add that ISBN can no longer stand generally independent of other identifiers, such as a work ID or party ID. For example, while assigning ISBNs to pre-1970 titles may make an ISBN agency’s revenues bulge, it may not be the most effective proposal for the supply chain. A more appropriate approach may be a combination of work ID, party ID and ISBN and, for this, we require a cohesive methodology and possibly a ‘merging’ of these standards in a more formal way.
This commentary naturally leads into a discussion of the construction of bibliographic databases, which I hope to present in the future.
(The above originally appeared in PersonaNonData.)
August 14th, 2009 at 7:38 am
One point that Mr. Cairns did not address is the high cost of ISBN (in the U.S.) for small and independent publishers. Interestingly, Mr. Cairns said that the big publishers have already obtained enough ISBN to last a lifetime. Yet the massive surge of digital titles is almost entirely from the small-, independent-, and self-publishers, each of which have to shell out substantial money to buy one or a small block of ISBN.
In general, the publishing community is not happy (to put it mildly) with the extortion-like pricing of ISBN in the United States. What do small publishers get in return? Pretty much zilch. Bowker has lost respect among the thousands of small and independent publishers who will be driving the future of digital publishing.
August 14th, 2009 at 10:24 am
i’m a librarian (acquisitions). at least one publisher in spain *re-uses* isbn’s. so amazon’s not the only entity to toss a monkey-wrench into the works. who knows what-all other mischief is being perpetrated across the globe. i’ve even seen self-publishers throw a made-up ‘isbn-looking number’ onto their book, to try to make their work look more like a real book. that is not as big a deal, because one always approaches non-professional work with a somewhat different expectation.
otherwise: ‘no data’ is preferable to ‘fake data’. especially if the ‘fake data’ apply to only one source for the material (e.g. amazon). the utility of the isbn lies in the fact that it rides *with the bibliographic unit* — not the seller. but *re-use* of the isbn by a publisher (e.g. my guys in spain) is unconscionable. it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of (or worse, a lack of regard for) the entire point of assigning such a thing to a publication. if you can’t afford more numbers, skip it. there are means of identifying the work based on its physical description which are quite adequate in the absence of the isbn. these methods are routinely applied to earlier works, and are extensible to isbn-less later works.
i would also expect that re-using isbn’s out of unwillingness to buy more numbers would be a violation of whatever agreement the publisher would have entered into with iso. but that’s speculation on my part. (okok; it’s what i would include in the agreement if *i* were iso.)
August 15th, 2009 at 8:51 am
What problem was ISBN system the solution to?, and does the problem looks the same into todays world? or have the technological and economic backdrop to society changed so that the origitnal problem is either gone or have changed so other solutions might be better?
Does the ISBN system even make sense for ebook, does it add something beside added burocracy? do we have any use for a central ident issuer, or would we be better up with an standard describing how to add identification metadate to “etext” containers, then having any organisation issuing numbers.
This could even work for barcode numbers with the first xx digits identifying the retailer and the next block the work and the last block the version, it’s being done for network equipments MAC adresses.