[HN Gopher] The Perils of ISBN
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The Perils of ISBN
Author : evakhoury
Score : 44 points
Date : 2026-02-18 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rygoldstein.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rygoldstein.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If the author sees this comment,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838 might be relevant
| as it relates to catalogue completeness. OpenLibrary is very
| good, but Anna's Archive is potentially more complete.
| bell-cot wrote:
| The first few para's of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN are a
| better summary of the issue.
|
| tl;dr; - The ISBN is intended to be a physical Part Number,
| within the book business. Where "hardcover, or paperback, or
| trade paperback, or large print, or revised edition, or ..." very
| much matters.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I'm not sure we always want 'works'. Sometimes different
| 'expressions' of the same work are different enough that they
| don't have the same value.
|
| For example, compare the most recent edition of 'Straight and
| crooked thinking' with the one published in 1930.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't know that work, but I agree with you in general because
| of forewords etc. Or even appendices. And _translations_ by
| different translators.
|
| I "grew up with" a specific translation of Lord of the Rings
| into Norwegian, for example. There are two. They are very
| different. But the editions also differ in whether they include
| the appendices, whose illustrations are used, and more.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| The most obvious example of this is the innumerable[0] versions
| of the Christian bible.
|
| [0] Before anyone says it, I'm sure some bible nerd has
| numbered them, it's hyperbole.
| millicentricism wrote:
| This also fails to take into account that ISBNs also contain the
| publisher ID in them. So identical copies of a book could have
| different ISBNs depending on which markets they are sold in.
| boznz wrote:
| I'm not sure this is the case, I got my ISBN range through my
| government national library service, I could be wrong but when
| you let them know what the book is you are publishing they ask
| for the Publisher name, though I am guessing as the service is
| free and it only applies to New Zealand books and publications.
| ilamont wrote:
| They don't contain the publisher name, but ISBNs are usually
| purchased in blocks of 10 or 100 or 1000 or whatever by a
| single entity, which is often a single publisher or
| corporation.
|
| However, within the block publishers can assign ISBNs to
| different imprints.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| I read that it's much worse than that, and there are ISBNs that
| were reused for completely different books.
| amiga386 wrote:
| This reminds me of MusicBrainz, whose database stores "release
| groups", e.g. the album _Nevermind_ by Nirvana is one, which can
| have hundreds of "releases", as different media (tape, CD, LP,
| promo, ...), different countries, later re-issues, etc. [0]
|
| Sometimes these have different catalogue numbers or barcodes to
| distinguish them, _sometimes they don 't_ but they're still
| different. I've seen releases where the only difference is the
| label in the centre of the LP, or the back of the CD case has a
| two-column tracklisting vs a one-column tracklisting. Music
| publisher uses the same code and says it's identical and yet it's
| clearly not.
|
| Then there's the "recordings" on an album, which even if they're
| never re-recorded can still end up chopped up, bleeped or
| remastered. They're not the same sound. MusicBrainz likes to
| track when they are exactly the same recording (e.g. the LP
| recording of a song appearing on a compilation album verbatim)
| and when they're not (e.g. radio edits of the LP recording). And
| if we're going beyond recordings by one artist of "their" song,
| i.e. cover versions, or just plain _standards_ , those are
| "works", with composers, lyricists, and can be recorded thousands
| of times by different artists...
|
| I greatly appreciate the pedantry and flexibility for noting down
| when creative works are the same versus where they differ, in
| relational database form.
|
| [0] https://musicbrainz.org/release-
| group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-865...
| SamWhited wrote:
| They actually have a (very new, still alpha, probably not a ton
| of data yet) database for books:
|
| https://bookbrainz.org/about
|
| I haven't looked into what their schema is like, but if it's
| anything like Musicbrainz it will be pretty comprehensive and
| easy to pull the data you want out of!
| jiggawatts wrote:
| My state had a reading competition that listed books by ISBN,
| which was a real challenge for students to track down. Each
| library had different editions and even different cover art, so
| if you "found" the book you might not recognise it on the shelf,
| etc...
|
| I worked on the library systems and one of my innovations was to
| use the ISBN mapping database of WorldCat to find books with
| identical content but different ISBNs to help kids find the books
| on the list.
|
| Over ten years that one SQL join in the code made the kids read
| an extra million books they wouldn't have otherwise.
|
| My biggest "bang for buck" in my career!
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