This puts me in mind of the old argument about how the Internet has “killed” the music industry, and the oft-heard retort that, no, it’s just hurting the record labels but that other parts of the music industry are thriving. By the same token, it would seem that the digital world might be hurting the big publishers, but the self-publishers and print-on-demand shops are thriving.

Much of the debate about ISBNs and e-books stems from the use of the word “format.” The question being, when is an e-book in one format, say ePUB, no longer an ePUB? We know, for example, that a Kindle version is a new format, because it is no longer an ePUB file, but a unique version that will only work with Amazon’s software.

Actually, I thought much of the debate about ISBNs and e-books stemmed from the extravagant cost of getting each ISBN (though in September Bowkers did announce a dramatic ISBN price cut), and some small publishers feeling that insisting each format should have a new one was just a way for Bowkers to sell more of them. But I digress.

Christopher looks at how the iBookstore and Smashwords handle ISBN assignment, and ponders the question of whether EPUB + DRM could be considered a different format, for the purposes of ISBN assignment, than EPUB without.

The reason for assigning a separate ISBN to each format, he explains, is to make sales tracking easier, so as to be better able to judge the overall performance of a title.

In a comment, former Bowker President Michael Cairns links to an article he originally wrote for Foreword Magazine giving more background on the ISBN situation. Cairns notes that the Book Industry Study Group has commissioned a study on ISBN use (which is being conducted by Cairns himself) which will help it formulate a policy to reconcile the objectives of the ISBN community with market realities.

(We carried a piece by Cairns last year on whether the ISBN was “dead”.)

Did you know that “ISBN” stands for “International Standard Book Number,” so whenever someone says “ISBN number” they’re committing a redundancy?

He went on to urge publishers to ensure the separate ISBNs were used on digital formats, to ensure they are counted differently to print formats. “Perhaps this is not being taken seriously enough now, but it will be taken seriously if a chart comes out and a major author isn’t number one because the publisher hasn’t put the right ISBN on the book,” he said. “We don’t want that to happen.”

The Globe and Mail of Toronto is reporting that: “Although some have suggested Google Editions will launch as early as next month, a person familiar with the project said that timeline is likely optimistic, and the service will probably go online later in the year.” More info here.

Thanks to Resource Shelf for the info.

Publishing Perspectives

Publishers tend to favor the single ISBN approach, while booksellers and wholesalers want one for each format. Perhaps not surprisingly—publishers are the ones who would have to pay for the ISBNs, after all, whereas retailers would get the most benefit from having separate unique identifiers for sales tracking. There is even a suggestion to issue separate ISBNs by region to make tracking regional sales easier.

The article says that “the International ISBN Agency and standards body EDItEUR hope to develop a web service whereby supply chain partners can easily request and receive format-level ISBNs from publishers”. In September, Bowkers announced it would be cutting the prices of ISBNs considerably.

One unrelated interesting thing I found in the article was this:

HarperCollins UK gives one ISBN to its e-books in epub format, which is the only format it sells. Says Graham Bell, head of publishing systems at HCUK: “We sell an epub to Amazon, and they sell it on to the consumer in a lightly modified version. Because Amazon sells the Kindle version exclusively, there’s no need for a different ISBN. We know that an Amazon sale is a Kindle sale.” The same will be true of iBooks sold by Apple.

A “lightly modified EPUB”? Really? Given that the Kindle is not compatible with EPUB, that must be some “modification”.

In a separate editorial/comment thread starter, Edward Nawotka asks whether separate ISBNs are really needed. It will be interesting to see the answers.

For more information check the article here. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the tip.

ISBNs are expensive

You don’t need them if your books are digital

Amazon doesn’t use them so you don’t need them

Consumers don’t search using them

You can find the full text here.

In 2010, the U.S. ISBN Agency will change its pricing models for ISBNs to accomodate the digital identification needs of authors, publishers, libraries and the supply chain at large. Unit prices all ISBN prefixes will be discounted by as much as 50% from the currently established rate structure, with additional discounts applied to large volume purchases.

At Bowker, we recognize the emergent need for a more economical solution for the practical and responsible identification of digital content and products. ISBN price decreases, however, are one of many necessary paradigm shifts that are necessary for the supply chain to effectively identify and catalogue digital assets for discovery and trading purposes.

See also this article from Reuters sent to me by Ian Sullivan.

Most importantly, as new digital formats and capabilities proliferate and diversify, end-users (consumers) must be able to differentiate one digital product form from another during discovery and the digital point of purchase, particularly when differentiated usability, access rights and functionality are key considerations to be made during a purchasing decision.

The ISBN standard has a proven track record as a supply chain identifier in the book industry, and the U.S. ISBN Agency is committed to maintaining this standard in the digital publishing supply chain. We encourage publishers and content owners to continue to leverage the ISBN for identifying digital products, and strongly discourage the use of alternative, non-standardized identifiers that will ultimately cause for confusion in trading and discovery.

More specific details regarding forthcoming ISBN pricing changes, as well as new value-added discoverability solutions that will be made available in conjunction with ISBN purchases, will be made available to the public before year end.

The book industry has had the ISBN for nearly 40 years; there has been little cause for excitement. Now, suddenly the whole subject of “identifiers” has become a hot topic, particularly when it comes to digital books and other online resources. This BISG Webcast will explore why the book industry has standard identifiers, and consider the future of the ISBN (International Standard Book Number), as well as the role of newer identification standards like ISTC (International Standard Text Code) and ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier). What do you need to know to make informed decisions about how — and whether — to use them?

Bookstores have long declined to sell print books without an ISBN, a reality of entering the book-distribution chain that new commercial ventures have simply had to accept. For physical objects — items that pass across a checkout counter’s barcode scanner — there’s no getting around it.

But inventory management is irrelevant to e-books, which aren’t barcode scanned, and so an ISBN isn’t required to provide a permanent and globally unique identifier. Many e-book publishers have found it simpler to piggyback on the internet’s domain-name system that guarantees unique web addresses and just utilize a URI as their GUID. After all, registering a domain ensures that no one else is using the prefix you begin with and URIs can be valid without referencing an actual web page.

Unfortunately, URIs are not inherently permanent and domain ownership lapses all too readily so this approach has problems. Perhaps if permanent URIs, such as those provided by PURL.org had been widely utilized, we would not today be hearing a clamor for applying different ISBNs to every format an e-book is issued in. But they weren’t, and the squawking of new and small publishers at the expense entailed more than matches that clamor.

For some years, Jon Noring has suggested establishing a registry for e-books. which would of necessity assign suitable GUIDs. Getting mandatory registration, though, is impossible and voluntary compliance from every publisher everywhere unlikely.

Monday, Teleread ran a piece by Elizabeth Burton decrying the unequal effect of requiring a small press in the U.S. to churn through these expensive ISBNs (whereas next door in Canada, publishers pay no charge at all for ISBNs). Discussion about ISBNs broke out anew in other places, including on the Reading 2.0 list.There Jon brought up a new twist to his suggestion that has a distinct stroke of brilliance.

The current ISBN-13 code is a conforming EAN-13 code, Jon pointed out. By utilizing EAN-13 similarly, e-book identifiers from a new registry would be compatible with ISBN-13.

And being compatible, an e-book-only identifier could be placed in the field intended for ISBNs in a sales or inventory program without causing anything to break in a bookseller’s database. (Even though such overloading isn’t necessarily advisable.)

Additionally being an EAN-13 number, this identifier provides the guarantee of uniqueness and vendor registration a retail business needs (the famous “if it doesn’t have an ISBN, they won’t be able to sell it in bookstores” dictum actually means EAN-13 today).

What’s more, a U.S.-ebook EAN-13 identifier would never duplicate an ISBN code. So publishers could stick with an all-ISBN system or mix the two as they find most convenient.

Let’s see: retailer friendly, affordable, complementary to and not overlapping the existing ISBN registry, globally unique and permanent, non-proprietary — this sounds like a good answer to the need for e-book identifiers to differentiate format within the larger “electronic” designation.

And with it, then booksellers, libraries, content repositories, and us content consumers could reasonably demand that all content producers and packagers provide the central piece of metadata that all of us want to be included in any book distributed electronically. Use the ISBN system or use this alternative, we can say, or don’t be downloading your untrackable files into my e-reader.

As per Jon, a completely new registry agency could be set up to distribute EAN-13-conformant e-book identifiers. However, as part of its intended role to further e-book standards and interoperability and keep our industry from factionalizing, I wonder why we do not expect IDPF to take this on.

Other than its post-dotCom-era lassitude, is there any reason we shouldn’t turn to IDPF? As a believer in metadata’s pre-eminent role in internet discovery, I’m convinced that permitting e-books to be issued without permanent and globally unique identifiers portends disaster.

IDPF should act promptly to forestall this. Who better to cope with this situation? It’s what a trade organization is for.

E-books and ISBNs

I would like to clear up some misapprehensions in Elizabeth Burton’s contribution on ISBNs for e-books.

ISBN is a voluntary standard

First, let me emphasise that ISBN is an ISO standard and, like all ISO standards, is voluntary with no legal compulsion to implement it. It is normally the major customers and supply chain who demand adoption of standards in order to provide greater efficiencies and this has certainly been the key to the success of the ISBN over the last 40 years.

This is not an issue that has only been “pushed in the US for several months”. The insistence on separate ISBNs for each format goes back to the original ISBN ISO standard in 1970 and was applied explicitly to electronic publications in the revision of 2005 which stated that ‘each different format of an electronic publication that is published and made separately available shall be given a separate ISBN.’ (N.B. Paul Durrant: this means that multiformat e-books, as you suggest, only need a single ISBN if they are not made separately available.) It is worth mentioning that the ISO working party that drafted this revision included representatives of major US booksellers, wholesalers, librarians and publishers.

Why assign ISBNs to each format?

The reasons for separately identifying different formats are broadly similar to those for identifying different physical formats. Ease of discovery of the different formats available, ease of trading and the possibility of collecting detailed sales data. If these are not considerations, for example where publishers are selling e-books exclusively from their own websites or through another single channel and do not wish to have them listed in books in print databases then, as Liz notes, publishers may not wish to bother with ISBNs. However, publishers should beware of taking a short-term view that makes them reliant on a single channel.

Who wants it?

It is quite wrong to suggest that this policy of unique identification is simply being promoted by ISBN interest. The fact is that libraries, intermediaries and booksellers who are not tied to a specific format are asking for this. For example JISC Collections, the body that buys online resources on behalf of the whole UK Higher education system, has said “Each e-book title should have a unique ISBN for its format and for its vendor. This is necessary to allow librarians to easily discover who is supplying e-books, in what format they are available and through which vendors they can acquire them.” I know that library consortia in the US and elsewhere take a similar line.

Third parties assigning ISBNs

Regarding assignment of ISBNs by the channels, it is already the policy of the International ISBN Agency that, if it is required by the supply chain, ISBN registrant prefixes may be allocated to e-book resellers to enable them to assign ISBNs to individual eBook formats if, and only if, the publisher has not provided an e-book ISBN for each format. This does not imply that the channel becomes the publisher of record. One of the conditions of assigning ISBNs in this way is that the original publisher will appear in the bibliographic records that the resellers provide to the bibliographic agencies. Please note that this is not a favoured way of doing things. It is simply a way of enabling certain parts of the supply chain to operate where publishers refuse to identify their own products in the standard way that customers are demanding. We would much rather have publishers identify their own products correctly.

ISBN and rights ownership

The ISBN does not and has never been an indication of rights ownership. The ISBN standard (ISO 2108) is very explicit on this subject.

Clothing IDs

Liz’s comparison with the clothing industry is rather misleading. The fact is that garments do have separate UPC/EAN numbers for every size and colour. This is required for the supply chain, whether online or physical. It is how the retailer orders the required stock and how the vendor tracks what is being sold. Of course mail order catalogs, like some online book stores, have no interest in showing these UPCs or, in many cases, the source of the product, as it would allow customers to shop for the same goods elsewhere. There is an almost precise parallel with the e-books debate in that it is the supply chain rather than the end user that requires the unique identifier.

It would certainly be possible for each retailer to assign their own proprietary SKUs. That was precisely the situation in the 1960s that led to the establishment of the ISBN as a standard way of identifying books without which e-commerce, national product databases spanning all publishers and a supply chain able to cope with millions of products would not be possible.

I haven’t touched on pricing issues as these are the concern of national agencies, with the proviso that they should be fair, but I know that national agencies are sensitive to the burden on smaller publishers and are looking at ways in which the cost of ISBNs can be reduced for e-books.

Identification at “work”level

In response to the comments on whether the manifestation or the actual content (“work”) should be identified, you should be aware that there is a separate new ISO identifier, the International Standard Text Code, that will identify the underlying work and link to all the different manifestations. Although this is being driven by the rights community, it may be of value to publishers, booksellers and librarians who wish to link together all formats of a single work. More information at www.istc-international.org.