Comments on: ISBNs unique? http://wordlily.com/2008/07/30/unique-isbns/ For the love of language (and some fiber arts, too) Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:18:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Resurrecting an old habit (and words!) « Word Lily http://wordlily.com/2008/07/30/unique-isbns/#comment-4038 Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:07:38 +0000 http://wordlily.wordpress.com/?p=315#comment-4038 [...] of the movies. We never really intended to abandon this habit, but somehow it happened. Last year, after months of trying, we finally received the 800-some page The Complete Father Brown Stories by G.K. Chesterton. I had [...]

]]> By: wordlily http://wordlily.com/2008/07/30/unique-isbns/#comment-1692 Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:34:44 +0000 http://wordlily.wordpress.com/?p=315#comment-1692 Andrew —

Actually, that ISBN page doesn’t answer my question at all. It merely affirms that ISBNs are intended as unique: “The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a 10-digit number that uniquely identifies books and book-like products published internationally.”

]]> By: Andrew Lister http://wordlily.com/2008/07/30/unique-isbns/#comment-1689 Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:01:16 +0000 http://wordlily.wordpress.com/?p=315#comment-1689 I just stumbled across Word Lily whilst trying too find a list of some unusual vocabulary in No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (hoping not to have to re-read it as I didn’t have a dictionary to hand when I found 2 very unusual words; but I digress…). You site looks very diverting, and I look forward to returning in the future – for now, I just wanted to share the following link with you regarding International Standard Book Numbers (as I believe the acronym for ISBN):

http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/us/isbnqa.asp

By the way, this took me about 3 seconds to find on-line, so I (politely) wonder why you didn’t try the same search as me before posting …

By the way, I too believed that ISBNs were intended to be unique. (I haven’t read the above FAQ page myself yet, though, which may explain all!) It is a possibility that the same text has been reprinted by the same publisher in completely different formats – larger print, smaller pages, which could cause dramatic increases in page number, but I have to say this seems to be stretching credulity somewhat.

Idle Fact regarding ISBNs – in the 60′s, if you were middle-class in the UK, you quite possibly joined the Puffin Club ( created by Kaye Webb, I believe) and one of their quarterly competitions used ISBN maths to sum two of their books and obtain a third – which you had to guess / identify to win the competition.

Kind regards, Andrew

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