Subject: [urn] ISBNs and pagination

From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2014 17:18:05 -0400

So I tried to determine whether changing the pagination of a book
(without changing the sequence of the words) requires changing the
ISBN.  The ISBN Users' Manual doesn't make that clear.  What I've
managed to find is:

https://www.isbn-international.org/content/isbn-assignment
"ISBN assignment"

    When to keep the same ISBN 

	 A reprint

	 The original ISBN must be retained, provided the publisher
	 remains the same and there are no changes to text or binding.

http://www.isbn.org/faqs_isbn_changes
"FAQs: How Changes Affect the ISBN"

    If typos are being corrected, is a new ISBN necessary?

    No.

Dale

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From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 9 Sep 2014 18:38:22 -0000

In article <[email-masked]> you write:
>ISBN.  The ISBN Users' Manual doesn't make that clear.

I'm not surprised.  ISBNs were designed for paper books, and are
assigned to e-books sort of by accident.  Their original and still
primary use is for inventory management at booksellers.

A way to think about whether two versions of a book need different
ISBNs, is to ask if a reasonable person ordered one and got the other,
would she believe that she got what she ordered.  A rough analogy here
might be trade and mass market paperbacks, which have the same text,
but are paginated and typeset differently.  They invariably have
different ISBNs.

At some point it's just a judgment call, e.g., paperbacks that have
multiple versions that differ only in cover artwork.

R's,
John

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2014 15:17:11 -0400

> From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
> 

An interesting point.  For a buyer that is a scholarly user, then two
volumes of a modern work, with exactly the same text but different
pagination, would be "different editions", because the same passage
would have to be cited differently in each edition.

(However, classical works usually have a canonical line numbering or
some such by which citations are done, and so the pagination of the
classical text into a modern edition is not critical for a scholarly
user.)

Dale