ISBN : Java Glossary

ISBN (International Standard Book Number). A unique number given to each book published. If you publish your own book, you can get an ISBN through Lulu, a self publishing house. You can set yourself up as a publisher, or register Lulu as the publisher.

13-digit ISBN numbers

This world is converting to the new Bookland EAN-13, 13-digit, bar-code ISBNs. It handles only 10-digit ISBNs. There is a program online to convert 10 to 13. All it does is prepend 978- to the old number and recompute the check digit, e. g.
0-915972-22-0 becomes 978-0-915972-22-7.
0-13-625666-X becomes 978-0-13-625666-3.

The new Bookland EAN-13 checkdigit is computed in an unusual way with mod 10 and weight 3. This means the 13-digit ISBN numbers are always purely numeric. There is never an X checkdigit as there is sometimes with the mod-10, 10-digit ISBNs. 10-digit ISBNs and 12-digit UPC (Universal Product Code)s are being unified as 13-digit EAN (European Article Number)s.

Praise

ISBNs are a remarkable political achievement. All the book publishers, book sellers and libraries had to agree on a common identification system for books. It would have been nice if, given an ISBN for a paperback, you could directly deduce the ISBN of the corresponding hard cover, or other revisions of the same paperback. Presumably that was too complicated to permit consensus. With huge computer databases, this cross linking can now be handled outside the numbering system. Consider that if you want to buy a TV, hard disk, kitchen appliance etc. there no corresponding universal product number or product classification scheme (e.g. for 1 TB (Terabytes) hard disks). Every manufacturer has their own part number scheme and every vendor has their own scheme. It makes comparison shopping difficult.

Alternate conversion program
Alternate ISBN-10 ⇔ ISBN-13 conversion program
Bookland EAN-13 13-digit ISBNs
Buy American ISBNs direct from Bowker
buy single ISBN from Ecko
buy single ISBN from SelfPublishing
buy single UK ISBN from Nielsen
EAN
Free Canadians ISBNs
ISBN Amanuensis
isbn

ISBN home page
ISBN hyphenation rules
UPC

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