U.S. ISBN Monopoly Denies Threat From Digital Self-Publishing

Ian Lamont writes "The Economist writes that self-publishing threatens the existence of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) regimen, which is used to track and distribute printed books. Self-publishing of e-books has experienced triple-digit growth in recent years, and the most popular self-publishing platforms such as Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing don't require ISBNs (Amazon assigns its own reference number to these titles). But Bowker, the sole distributor of ISBNs in the United States, sees an opportunity in self-publishing. The packages for independent authors are very expensive — Bowker charges $125 for a single ISBN, and $250 for ten. It also upsells other expensive services to new and naive authors, including $25 barcodes and a social widget that costs $120 for the first year. Laura Dawson, the product manager for identifiers at Bowker, insists that ISBNs are relevant and won't be replaced anytime soon: 'Given how hard it is to migrate database platforms and change standards, I wouldn't expect to replace the ISBN, simply because it is also an EAN, which is an ISO standard that forms the backbone of global trade of both physical and digital items. There are a lot of middlemen, even in self-publishing. They require standards in order to communicate with one another.'" It seems like a lot of programs/services just use ASINs (despite being controlled by a single private entity), probably indicating some deficiency with the current centralized registration regime. Back in 2005, Jimmy Wales suggested we needed something (culturally) similar to wikipedia for product identifiers. The O'Reilly interview indicates that the folks issuing ISBNs think DOIs are DOA too.

Re:"Very expensive"?

[CalRobert]

Your broader point really strikes a chord - I find my friends have a hard time understanding why I would spend $500 on taking a class at a community college (after about 6 of them my career improved immeasurably thanks to the skills earned) or $1000 getting a visa to work in a different country (which is cheap, really), yet they seem fine with spending boatloads of cash on a fancier car, or eating out all the time. To each their own, and if that's what they want to do then good for them, but I don't get their surprise.

cryptographic hash

[marvinglenn]

Especially for digital books, but to be used on the digital information that a regular book is printed from... a cryptographic hash of the book is the book identifier. Decentralized, unlikely to have a number collision, and the added bonus of a mechanism to make sure that the book you received is the book you wanted. The only thing that needs to be centralized is the decision of which hash to use, how to hash the data, and how to represent the hash as to the user.

Re:cryptographic hash

[burisch_research]

Books go through many revisions. The link may be referring to an outdated version; and while it's possible you might WANT that old version, chances are that you want the most recent one. This destroys the hash argument, I'm afraid.