Book People Archive

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

John Ockerbloom wrote about ISBNs and DOIs and Handles.  That's all
nice, and you can also use URNs and PURLs for the similar purposes of
just getting some permanent identifier on your works.

However, there are more problems with ISBNs:

One problem is that old books (pre 1960s) have not been assigned ISBN
numbers.  Who is going to get a DOI prefix and assign a number to the
1st edition of Darwin's "The Origin of Species"?  The British Library?
LoC?  OCLC?  ALA?  RLG?  IPL?  John?  If more than one institution
does this, it will be almost as useless as if noone does it.  The idea
with the number is that it should be unique.  Has anybody heard of any
such efforts?

Another problem is that ISBNs (and DOIs?) identify forms of a book,
not the abstract "work" (the novel) as such.  If my website has a
review of "The Lord of the Rings" and I want to link to Amazon.com so
my readers can buy the book, I have to use an ISBN number that is
either a hardcover or paperback version.  Moreover, if I use the ISBN
number of my own copy for the link, it is likely that this
edition/printing is long sold out.  Hopefully, the Amazon.com
webserver can resolve and translate my link to some useful replacement
copy, and also hint the user that the same title is also available in
paperback, audio tape or film.  But my reader might also want to know
if there is a translation in another language!  What I would like to
see here, is some number that identifies the work, the title, and
stays the same across different publishers, editions, and
translations.  Is anybody doing this?  Obviously, Amazon.com is
building their own database on which ISBN numbers can replace each
other.  Oh would I like a copy of that database!


--
  Lars Aronsson (lars@[redacted]
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linkoping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se