On 12/09/2007, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
Just for information...
Is it still the case that ISBN:s automatically link to some "thingy" that enables one to order the volume from Amazon (and/or perhaps some other book supplier on the web) ?
Yes. It goes direct to a page listing a few hundred links, which are automatic links into Amazon (and some of their less well-known competitors) and an absurdly large number of deeplinks into library catalogues.
If anyone feels really public-spirited (for the world in general, not just WP), consider writing a patch to Special:Booksources to somehow do on-the-fly integration with xISBN and similar other-editions tools; this would be *incredibly* useful, and would make that page a vital resource rather than a curiosity.
(ISBNs refer to a specific edition or, sometimes, a specific printing; a given work usually has two, often four or six, sometimes literally hundreds or thousands. You can see why the crossreferencing would make this oh so much better)