Discussion of the disjoint between the print world identifiers called ISBNs and the digital world. This was a presentation given at Kohacon10 in Wellington October 2010

1. eBooks: Why they break ISBNs
Stuart Yeates
http://www.nzetc.org/

2. Digital Publishing
It's different from print publishing

3. Who we are
● Unit of the Victoria University library
● Digital (re)publisher of documents used in
teaching, learning and research
● TEI/XML, tomcat/cocoon/XSLT
● Out-sourced digitisation
● In-house authority control

4. Demo 1
Search “ture pooti”

5. Demo 2
Search “William Williams”

6. Demo 3
Search “Robin Hyde”

7. ePubs
● Open standard for eBooks
● A zip file of all the same stuff you can put on a
static website
● DAISY metadata for naviation
● XHTML, CSS, etc
● We create ePubs by crawling our website
● Device not page does navigation
● grep dimensioned measurements from CSS

8. ISBNs
● Widely used in the print world to track editions
● Issued to publishers by a bureaucracy
● Used end-to-end in supply chain
● Printing, wharehousing, distribution,
wholesaling, retailing, purchase, cataloging,
circulation, …

9. Print Runs
● 99% of the time in traditional prublishing ISBNs
are print run identifiers
● Print runs are extraordinarily expensive
● Print runs are a speculative gamble on the part
of publishers
● Print runs have no direct analogue in the pure-
digital model

10. What's an edition?
● Currecting a single-character OCR error?
● Authority control change in body?
● Authority control change in metadata?
● Decreasing image quality?
● Increasing image quality?
● Factual corrections?

11. What's an edition?
● It doesn't matter because all non-commercial
ePubs are “digital photocopies” and don't
quality for ISBNs anyway.

12. What kind of identifier do we need?

13. Free of bureaucracy
● Arguments about what an “book” / “eBook” is
● Arguments about what an “edition” is
● Arguments about jurisdiction (cloud, ISO, etc)
● Baked-in assumptions about who produces
what, why and for whom
● $$$ to support

14. Enormously plentiful
● Many more things appear to qualify as eBooks
than books
● ISBNs are being reused
● Versions / updates
● NZETC: 1300 works x regenerated monthly

15. Naïve hashes insufficient
● “Use an hash of the ePub as the identifier”
● Needs to be an identifier not the identifier
● The identifer can't be used within the ePub
● Many tools in the tool chain alter the ePub

16. Questions
● Does a bookseller's sticker on a book make it a
“different” book?
● Does an author's signature?
● Does the intended market?