[HN Gopher] ISBNdb dump - how many books are preserved forever?
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ISBNdb dump - how many books are preserved forever?
Author : pilimi_anna
Score : 103 points
Date : 2022-10-31 16:58 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (annas-blog.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (annas-blog.org)
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Forever? 0.
| bloak wrote:
| Google has claimed that about 130 million books have been
| published (that factoid is all over the web). The number of
| 10-digit ISBNs is 1000 million (there's a check digit) and people
| have only just started using 13-digit ISBNs that start with 979
| instead of 978; but of course there must be lots of wasted ISBNs,
| for example when a publisher optimistically buys a big block and
| then goes bankrupt. Both those numbers suggest that the "ISBNdb"
| with less than 31 million ISBNs is far from complete.
|
| The frequency of each top-level prefix (which tells you the
| geographical or language region) would be interesting. That would
| the first thing I'd calculate if I had the data on my disc.
| 23skidoo wrote:
| I'm a little perplexed by the ISBN system. The whole
| centralized affair, where you have to purchase ISBNs seems like
| a racket. ISBNs cost more in some countries (America) than they
| do in others (Canada). Not for any reason other than that they
| can get away with it.
|
| Much better would be a UUID generated from unique values, like
| a hash of the timestamp and publisher of a book. If you limit
| the length and number of the fields you hash to generate the
| UUID, you could even prove there will be zero collisions and
| eliminate any need to collision checks and thus an organization
| that charges money.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| While archaic, ISBN doesn't seem a bad system to me.
|
| Short values are more reliable in retail situations. They can
| be typed in by hand or read with cheap scanners.
|
| You are of course free to publish without an ISBN if you
| don't care about the legacy publishing ecosystem.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I always loved how despite the massive domain differences, the
| ISBN situation is _extremely_ similar to the IPv4 /IPv6
| situation (except more aggressively rent-seeking), with
| prefixes leased out to the old dogs, concerns about eventual
| address/isbn exhaustion, a scheme for mapping old ISB10 to new
| ISBN13 codes, etc etc.
| eCa wrote:
| Yeah, lots and lots of unused ISBNs. As an example, O'reilly
| has the 978-0-596 series. That's a hundred thousand editions.
| adolph wrote:
| _An ISBN is assigned to each separate edition and variation
| (except reprintings) of a publication. For example, an e-book,
| a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book will each
| have a different ISBN._
|
| Additionally, there is address fragmentation; ISMB has blocks:
|
| _ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued
| by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for that
| country or territory regardless of the publication language.
| The ranges of ISBNs assigned to any particular country are
| based on the publishing profile of the country concerned, and
| so the ranges will vary depending on the number of books and
| the number, type, and size of publishers that are active. Some
| ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or
| within ministries of culture and thus may receive direct
| funding from the government to support their services. In other
| cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by
| organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not
| government funded._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN
| contingencies wrote:
| Many things are published without ISBNs or have ISBNs and
| aren't traditional books. Here in China, to get an ISBN for a
| book you have to have a government approval process. So many
| publishers will print stuff on the proverbial sly, often at
| night, without assigning an ISBN. There's also book-like
| printed matter (pamphlets, maps, posters, puzzles, 3D/fold-out
| dioramas, etc.) which often lack an ISBN. So equating ISBN with
| book is not correct. Then there's all the stuff published pre-
| ISBN...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > extracting ISBNs from the actual book scans themselves (in the
| case of Z-Library/Libgen).
|
| OpenLibrary also uses book scans in Archive.org to extract ISBNs
| (and a few other bits of metadata, like urls in the text):
|
| https://blog.openlibrary.org/2021/08/23/gsoc-2021-making-boo...
|
| And have a software pipeline for that kind of thing available.
| pilimi_anna wrote:
| There's probably a lot of things that Open Library does that we
| can try to apply to shadow libraries!
| pugworthy wrote:
| Define "forever" in this context? 10 years? 100? 1000?
|
| It's a legit question to answer.
| billblack wrote:
| As someone who would like to publish, my main concern with ISBN's
| is the cost, because publishers are required to assign an ISBN to
| every item in their catalog.
|
| Section 6.1 of the ISBN International User Manual "A separate
| ISBN shall be assigned to each separate monographic publication
| or separate edition or format of a monographic publication issued
| by a publisher."
|
| This would not be a problem if the numbers were more affordable.
| pilimi_anna wrote:
| This is interesting to learn about. How expensive is it, and do
| you know if it differs around the world (since there are lots
| of national ISBN agencies)?
| jkingsman wrote:
| It's $125 list price for a single ISBN, but there are bulk
| discounts buying direct and purchasing through a large scale
| supplier can make them as cheap as $10 each. There are deals
| to be had; Amazon, for example, may give you a free ISBN for
| your ebook as long as you publish it using KDP, their walled-
| garden publishing system, but the gotcha is the ISBN is not
| portable/you're not permitted to use it for other editions
| outside of the Amazon system.
|
| The other downside to these free (just about always) and
| discounted (sometimes) ISBNs is that they link the publisher
| as the service you got the ISBN through, rather than
| yourself, even if you're doing what would classically be
| considered a self-publishing job. How big of an issue is
| that? IANAExpert, but it seems like there are some nooks and
| crannies of IP law that can be swayed by owning the imprint,
| but little practical concern for the average person putting
| an ebook on Amazon e.g. Perhaps someone with more in depth
| publishing knowledge can color the risks better than I.
| pilimi_anna wrote:
| $125 is steep, but $10 sounds very doable (for the US).
|
| Good point on the "publisher" linking caveat though. I
| don't know much that matters in this day and age? Would be
| useful to learn from some published authors.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Can I just start a non profit "publisher", buy a block of
| ISBNs, and hand them out at cost? Costco for ISBNs sort of
| thing, just enough margin to pay for a few hours a year of
| my time and a little app to drive the process.
|
| Edit: HN throttling, can't reply. What if the Internet
| Archive gets a block and hands them out via Open Library?
| They seem positioned to argue they're a bonafide publisher.
| Finnucane wrote:
| "There are unauthorized re-sellers of ISBNs and this
| activity is a violation of the ISBN standard and of
| industry practice. A publisher with one of these re-
| assigned ISBNs will not be correctly identified as the
| publisher of record in Books In Print or any of the
| industry databases such as Barnes and Noble or Amazon or
| those of wholesalers such as Ingram."
| Finnucane wrote:
| >Amazon, for example, may give you a free ISBN for your
| ebook as long as you publish it using KDP,
|
| That is indeed a bit of a ruse, since an ISBN is supposed
| to identify an edition or format, but not the sales
| channel. We give our epub files an ISBN, and all the
| vendors that sell that file (including Amazon) use the same
| number. But when you publish with KDP, you are not the
| publisher. Amazon is, so you have less say in the matter.
| wrs wrote:
| For the US, between $125 each (for 1) and $1.50 each (for
| 1000) from the official source, a company called Bowker. The
| structure is described in Bowker's FAQ [0].
|
| [0] http://isbn.org/faqs_general_questions#isbn_faq6
| fragmede wrote:
| In the middle is 10 for $295, which is $30 per. That's a
| small enough number that you can split the cost with a few
| friends. But you can also get one from Australia, $88 for
| 10 or $44 for one.
| jwilk wrote:
| In Poland, you get ISBNs for free.
| gigel82 wrote:
| That's surprising; I wanted to make a picture book (with a bit
| of text the kids wrote) to send to grandparents and stumbled
| upon BookWright; seemed an affordable choice but was very
| surprised they actually included an ISBN with the little one-
| off kids picture book.
|
| Maybe they're just sitting on a big block of numbers and just
| giving them away...
| omoikane wrote:
| That statement of "before the demise of Google Books" seems
| unnecessary. The next quoted bit of "at least until Sunday" might
| have been an attempt to complete the joke, but should be
| interpreted as the number of books changing rapidly according to
| the (12 year old) linked article.
|
| http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-...
| tedivm wrote:
| The timing on this for me is really interesting, as last week I
| got an ISBN issues for a book I'm working on (9781633438002 if
| anyone is curious!).
|
| This will be the first book I'm the author of, but the second
| book I've worked on (the first I was the technical editor for).
| Neither of these books are out yet (I start writing tomorrow) but
| they both have ISBNs issued. Even if I never publish the book
| that ISBN is locked in.
|
| I imagine there's a lot of books that started out but never got
| finished. That said it looks like ISBNdb doesn't grab directly
| from the source, but instead crawls the internet looking for ISBN
| data to put into its database. I'll be interested to see at which
| stage my ISBN shows up in the database.
| delecti wrote:
| What's the rationale behind reserving an ISBN before even
| beginning the writing process?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Before writing might be a bit early, but before finishing and
| producing is useful as it can be listed early in catalogs for
| preorder. Getting the ISBN earlier probably is cheap and
| allows the publisher to use the ISBN as identifier for the
| whole project.
| tedivm wrote:
| I have no idea why they assigned it this early, but that
| seems as likely a reason I can think of.
|
| It was only assigned the day we finalized the contract, and
| there was a lot of work before that working the proposal
| through the system and getting reviews from the target
| audience and people familiar with the topic. It's only now
| that I'm expecting to hand content over on a schedule that
| they assigned the number.
| lmm wrote:
| It's a good unique key to use for tracking the book, even
| internally. You might change the title of the book at a late
| stage. You could use your own ID scheme, but what if your
| publisher merges with another while the book production is in
| process?
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