E-books and ISBNs, by Brian Green, Executive Director, International ISBN Agency

Editor’s note: Brian submitted this article to me and was unsure as to whether he should actually submit it as a comment to Elizabeth Burton’s article. I thought the subject important enough that it deserved its own place as a separate article. Many thanks to both Elizabeth and Brian for their contributions on this issue. PB

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.