International Standard Book Number

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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.

ISBN-10

Mills & Boon ISBN 1970

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

Mills & Boon, barcode of 1987 with EAN-13 and price

Since January 2007 the ISBN-13 is used following the European Article Number (EAN) which was used by European publishers for a long time.

Mills & Boon, barcode of 2007

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.