ISBN

[Robert Maier]

To get the articles on ISBN (i.e., International Standard Book
Numbers) out of comp.unix.wizards, I've redirected followups to
misc.misc...

In article <18244 at adm.BRL.MIL> moss at cs.umass.edu (Eliot Moss) asks
about foreign use of ISBN's (International Standard Book Numbers), in
particular British use.

As a couple of previous posters have explained, ISBN's are in the
format

	nation-publisher-title-checksum


with a weighted mod 11 checksum.  (The mysterious "X" in the checksum
field, which one occasionally encounters, means 11.)

According to the 1988 edition of Whitaker's Books in Print (formerly
British Books in Print), this format originated in the UK and was
fully implemented by 1969, with the exception of some titles imported
from abroad.  The early UK origin explains why the `nation' code is
generally 0 for the UK, the USA and other English-language countries.
Countries that came late to the ISBN have longer nation codes, just as
new publishers are assigned longer publisher codes.

According to Whitaker's, some new publishers in the UK are being
assigned nation codes of 1 instead of 0.  Apparently the publisher
codes were getting too long.

It is not clear whether any effort has been taken to make the `nation'
code consistently signify a language area rather than a country.  But
the language in which a book is written definitely does not affect the
code.

--
Robert S. Maier
INTERNET: rsm at amethyst.ma.arizona.edu
SNAIL: Dept. of Math.; Univ. of Arizona; Tucson, AZ 85721; USA
PSTN: +1 602 621 6893 / +1 602 621 2617		BITNET: maier at arizrvax
UUCP: ..{allegra,cmcl2,hao!noao}!arizona!amethyst!rsm