Arthur Attwell

Book Industry Communication (BIC) has published a code of practice for assigning ISBNs to digital content. (I've included the full text below. Here's the original PDF.) The code is sensible in some ways, and less so in others, as I'll explain in a moment. On the whole, though, it's good to see efforts like this towards industry standards.

The code starts with this obvious but important statement: "All products delivered through the traditional supply chain must … be assigned ISBNs." The operative world here being "traditional". This seems sensible, even though it is increasingly difficult to say where the "traditional" supply chain starts and ends any more. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that any product that might be tracked or delivered through an ISBN-dependent system should have an ISBN.

Perhaps the most important ISBN-dependent feature of most publishing companies is sales reporting, which the code highlights. The code also mentions the usefulness of ISBNs for "search and discovery in publicly available retailer databases". We shouldn't underestimate the value of the ISBN as an identifier that a great many consumers recognise and use. The ebook industry has done a great job of confusing its customers; let's leave them the ISBN, at least. While us technically obsessed folk may find the ISBN often less than useful, abandoning it for ebooks will have the marketing department up in arms.

The code of practice does wobble where it deals with chunked content (book content sold in, say, chapters or short, discrete passages): "In most cases it is anticipated that such 'chunks' will be solely distributed by the publisher itself or by its sole digital distributor." It takes a brave person to anticipate anything in the digital world. Contrary to the assertion in the code, it's unlikely that publishers won't want or won't allow a wide range of distributors to sell chunked content. Already services like Symtext and Bookriff are selling chunked content on behalf of publishers, which suggests that there will be many good reasons to provide chunked content to a wide range of "build your own book" content resellers, each with their own niche-specific value-adds.

Nonetheless, the suggestion that these chunks not be assigned ISBNs is a sensible one. For various reasons (there aren't enough of them, and in some countries they cost money), ISBNs wouldn't work well for chunked content. However, it remains to be seen whether identifiers for chunks will or should become standardised to any extent. Any degree of standardisation – such as URLs and/or UUIDs – would probably help to foster an ecosystem for distributing chunked content widely.

Here's the text of the code published on the BIC website, as found there on 21 December 2009.

Book Industry Communication

39-41 North Road ∙ London N7 9DP

Telephone 020 7607 9021 ∙ Fax 020 7607 0415

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CODE OF PRACTICE FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF E-BOOKS AND DIGITAL CONTENT

General principles

The ISBN is the book trade’s only identifier for trading products in the supply chain. All products delivered through the traditional supply chain must therefore be assigned ISBNs.

Publishers should assign ISBNs to e-books and downloadable audio books whenever there is a need to do so:

• for the purposes of trading through conventional channels;

• for search and discovery in publicly available retailer databases;

• or for item/product-level sales reporting (whether for royalties or for sales data reporting).

If ISBNs are allocated internally for non-traded products, activities or files, such ISBNs should not be notified to the bibliographic services or to others – retailers, wholesalers, libraries - within the supply chain.

Publishers

Publishers must retain responsibility, wherever possible and appropriate, for the metadata of the products they publish, in all formats, print and digital. Publishers should not assign ISBNs to non-product source or production files which are not being traded in the supply chain. If they do so for internal reasons, they should ensure that these are not released externally.

In many cases, e-books sold by intermediaries through a single channel (e.g. Amazon Kindle, library e-book vendors) do not require ISBN assignment unless this level of detail is required by the publisher for sales reporting. It is expected that consumers and librarians will discover such single-channel digital formats through dedicated resources rather than through the bibliographic services and industry databases.

Where a title is supplied to an intermediary with multiple distribution channels (e.g. Gardners, OverDrive) ISBNs should be assigned in consultation with the intermediary to facilitate trading individual digital products or appropriately granular sales reporting.

Publishers have expressed concern about the ‘systems bloat’ potentially resulting from the allocation of separate ISBNs to fragments (chapters, ‘chunks’ of text, and so on) sold separately. In most cases it is anticipated that such ‘chunks’ will be solely distributed by the publisher itself or by its sole digital distributor. In such cases, internal system SKU file-names or identifiers (which might be an ‘internal’ ISBN) will meet all the publisher’s needs.

Publishers are encouraged to assign DOIs to such ‘chunks’ to provide pointers to web resources describing the ‘chunk’ and the terms under which it can be obtained. The DOI cannot be used as a tradable product identifier.

Bibliographical services

Bibliographic services should make every effort to capture and record the publication of digital products which are traded through multiple distribution channels and which are available through conventional book trade channels.

This will involve the collection of data both from publishers but also from intermediaries reselling e-content on a non-exclusive basis.

It is recommended that the bibliographic services should only record and disseminate information about products which are available in the supply chain and have been assigned unique ISBNs.

Intermediaries, resellers and digital asset distributors

Intermediaries must decide on the basis of their own trading requirements – and in discussion with suppliers, where appropriate - the cases where an ISBN is required when it has not been previously assigned by the publisher.

A recent change in the ISBN rules allows intermediaries to assign their own ISBN to an e-book or downloadable audio product if the publisher has not done so; but this is discouraged as not being good practice.

Publishers are recommended to assign ISBNs from their own stock to such digital products; and mechanisms for rapid and automatic assignment of publishers’ ISBNs should be put in place.

Where intermediaries and resellers assign their own prefix ISBNs these should be notified to the publisher as soon as possible.

Sales reporting should be by ISBN to the level of granularity required by the publisher to fulfil author or management obligations.

Sales reporting should be electronic, using an industry-agreed standard message wherever possible, and to an industry-agreed timetable.

December 2009