ISBN. Not just a bunch of pretty numbers.

Which is what I assumed they were, up until recently. I recognised that old books didn’t have them, and that most of them started with 978. That was about the range of knowledge I held on the matter.  Here are five points, that I learnt about ISBN’s this week.

·         ‘ISBN’, stands for international Standard Book Number.

·         They consist of 13 numbers (since 2007 anyway), and these 13 numbers are separated into five chunks, each with a different purpose.

-          The first chunk is always, (post 2007), 978. I don’t know why. More research methinks.

-          The second chunk is a country identifier

-          The third is a publisher identifier

-          The fourth, a title identifier/edition identifier

-          And lastly, there’s one lonely digit perched on the end. This is called a Check Digit, and it validates the ISBN.  – The one’s that end in an X? That just means ten. Roman numerals suddenly come into play when you want to use 10, as 10 has 2 digits, as opposed to the 1 needed. 

·         They were invented in 1965, by a guy called Gordon Foster. They had 9 digits back then and were called a ‘Standard Book Numbering’ code. He was good at maths.

·         A 10 digit version, developed by the International Organization for Standardization (try saying that ten times fast) replaced this in 1970. Apparently the UK clung onto the old 9 digit version until 1974, when it decided to get with it and update to join the rest of the world.

·         Then the lovely 13 digit version arrived in January 2007, making superstitious people everywhere twitch, and it’s been that way ever since.

There you go. A brief history, with huge gaps in it, of the ISBN and what its role is. 

 

Over and out.