International Standard Book Number
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a unique book identifier. Publishers don't have to assign an ISBN to a book, but it makes book trading much easier and most booksellers only handle titles with ISBNs.
The 10-digit ISBN was introduced as an international standard in 1970. It based on the Standard Book Numbering (SBN) in the UK of 1966 and added the language-speaking country identifier to their 9-digit.
Contents
ISBN-10
The parts of the 10-digit ISBN (ISBN-10) are:
- A = the language-speaking country identifier
It tells which language is spoken in the country the publisher comes from. In this case 0 for English. Others are:
- 1 - English
- 2 - French
- 3 - German
- 4 - Japanese
- 5 - Russian
- 7 - Chinese
- 8 + second digit - Spanish (84), Portuguese (85) and Italian (88)
- B = publisher code
The national ISBN agency assigns a code to every publisher of its country. In this case 263 for Mills & Boon. Together with the language-speaking country identifier it is the ISBN Prefix of the publisher, in this case 0-263.
- C = item number
It is the publisher's number for the book, in this case 71164.
- D = check digit
It is a checksum with a very complicated calculation, in this case 1. If this number isn't correct Amazon.com won't find the book.
ISBN-13
Since January 2007 the ISBN-13 is used following the European Article Number (EAN) which was used by European publishers for a long time.
It is a 978 or 979 in front of the ISBN-10 but with different check digit (the D in the first image). The ISBN-10 for this book is ISBN 0-263-85364-0.
Links
Double ISBNs
The early Harlequin Presents titles had an ISBN staring with 0-373-70 plus their series number + 500 plus the check digit. Janet Dailey's A Land Called Deseret of 1979 has the ISBN 0-373-70826-2, being #326 of the series. In 1999 Harlequin used the ISBN again, now for #826 of the Harlequin Superromance series. Thus Abe.com sometimes shows the Harlequin Superromance cover next to Janet Dailey's book description.
