Sabina Pagotto

Ah, ISBNs. Those international (technically) standard (lol) book (I suppose) numbers.

The truth is, there isn’t a lot of standardization in how publishers apply and use ISBNs. You’re supposed to have a different ISBN for different editions and formats of each title–paperback, hardcover, ebook, etc.–but what constitutes a “different” “edition” can vary. Recently a book collector mentioned to me that they wished that each different cover of a book had a different ISBN. Meanwhile, working with academic ebooks I’m often frustrated with a title that has different eISBNs for PDF, EPUB, and Open Access. (Don’t ask me why a publisher needs the OA version of a book to have a different ISBN than any other version. It’s probably a scam.) Don’t even get me started on series-level ISBNs! An practice that perhaps makes sense with a box set of printed volumes but makes very little sense for a series of academic monographs published over the course of several years.

And that’s just when you’re using ISBNs in a manner that could be deemed correct! There are also publishers (mainly NGOs, think tanks, and government departments themselves) who play fast and loose with ISBNs, sometimes assigning the same one to multiple reports. (Reports! Not even books! Yeah so discovery of government and grey literature is basically a nightmare.)

Unfortunately, while there isn’t a lot of standardization in how ISBNs are applied by publishers, we do like to treat them in a fairly standard way in libraries. This leads to great levels of agony when, say, you get a MARC record from a vendor that lists 10 different ISBNs and doesn’t identify which ISBN is for which format (or even, which one is actually the series ISBN!). I’ve even seen ebooks that come into us with over 40 ISBNs, because for some godforsaken reason the publisher decided to include ISBNs for the title itself, series ISBN, and ISBNs for all of the other monographs in that series. Awful.

To make matters worse from an access & discovery perspective, the KBART files that populate knowledgebases only include room for one print and one electronic ISBN, and knowledgebases themselves are notoriously bad at handling things like multivolume sets. Not to mention, the reliance on ISBNs for content matching means that older content or specialized content without an ISBN is often left by the wayside.

I don’t have a solution here–although I do wish KBART had better support for title-level DOIs. All I have to offer are a few ISBN-related jokes. Mostly bad puns.

• ISBNS: Wherefore?
• the series level ISBN: for academic publishers who don’t know when to leave well enough alone
• ISBN, WHYsbn
• International Standard Book Number more like Imprecise miSleading Book(?) Number
• ISBNs. [waits for audience laughter]

…yeah, so, probably a reason there isn’t much library-themed standup.