Book People Archive

Re: Re: Possible conference for on-line book publishing?



At 11/02/01 11:20 -0500, rodhay@[redacted] wrote:
>ISBN numbers are not random. There is a pattern. The first number
>indicates the country. Then there is a number for the publisher.
>And then a number for the book assigned by the publisher. The final
>number is a check number based on the previous numbers. Each of these

No, except for the country prefix it's random.  Buying a particular block
of numbers does not reserve any OTHER adjacent span of numbers. If you buy
10 numbers today, and 10 numbers next month, the beginning part of it will
not be the same. The only reason that huge publishers seem to have
consistent numbers is that they bought huge quantities of ISBN's at once.
[The economies of scale in the pricing are jaw-dropping]

Michael Oltz