What Is An ISBN And What Is Its Purpose?

If you are an avid reader or purchase books from websites such as Amazon or Barnes and Noble, you have no doubt come across the ISBN, either printed in the book itself or as part of the search criteria on a retailer's website. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number and is a unique numeric identifier used in the book industry. An ISBN is printed on the lower portion of the back cover of a book above the bar code and on the copyright page. The purpose of the ISBN is to identify one title or edition of a title from a specific publisher and is unique to that edition. The ISBN applies to any monographic publication in printed, non-printed and mixed media formats

History of the ISBN

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering (SBN) code created by Professor Gordon Foster, a professor of statistics at Trinity College, Dublin in 1966. Initially this code was only to be used in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.

Eventually however this 9-digit code was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) was created. This was the first edition of the ISO Standard 2108. The new 10-digit ISBN was to be used worldwide to identify individual titles or editions of published works. From 1970 every ISBN consisted of ten digits and whenever it was printed it is preceded by the letters ISBN. The ten-digit number is divided into four parts separated by a hyphen or space, each part being variable is length. For example ISBN 0-571-08989-5.

The four parts of an ISBN are as follows:

1. First Part is the Group or country identifier which identifies a national or geographic grouping of publishers. The group identifier is a 1 - 5 digit, 0 and 1 are for English speaking countries;

2. The Second Part is the Publisher identifier which identifies a particular publisher. Publishers receive blocks of ISBNs which are sold to them in blocks of 10, 100, and 1000. These blocks are then specific to that publisher and cannot be used by any other publisher.

3. The Third Part is the Title identifier which identifies a particular title or edition of a title;

4. The Check digit is the last digit of the ten-digit ISBN and must range from 0 to 10 (the symbol X is used instead of 10) and is computed from the other 9 digits in the ISBN. Using a pre-determined algorithm, it is possible to use the check digit to check the accuracy of the ISBN to ensure its validity and that no digits have been altered.

In May 2005, the 13-digit ISBN was introduced in the fourth edition of the ISO Standard 2108. As of January 2007, ISBN agencies all over the world have began to assign new ISBN numbers that are 13 digits long, replacing the 10 digit numbers currently provided. They are all built on existing ISBN-10s and have the prefix '978'.

As blocks of ISBN-13s built on existing ISBN-10s are depleted, new blocks will be prefixed with '979' instead of the current '978.' This additional element in effect makes an ISBN into a Universal Product Code known as an EAN (International Article Number) which uses 13 digits to uniquely identify retail products worldwide.

This reason for the change was two fold; firstly to prevent the number of new ISBNs from running out, but also to align the ISBN system into a wider system of EAN. An example of a current 13 digit ISBN is ISBN-13 978-0-123456-47-2

As a result of these changes the current 13-digit ISBN consists of 5 parts;

1. The current ISBN-13 is prefixed by "978"

2. The Group or country identifier

3. The Publisher identifier

4. The Title identifier and

5. The Check digit which validates the ISBN.

ISBN agencies have the exclusive authority of assigning these numbers. There are 160 such agencies around the world. In the United States and it's territories, the U.S. ISBN Agency at Bowker is the only official source of ISBNs.

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