On 12/09/2007, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Typically, sellers of new books will only show the ISBNs of current editions. Books that have a new edition each year will have a long range of ISBNs and will distinguish hard and soft cover, or even whether there are thumb tabs in the fore edge. I very much agree with the usefulness of a reference work that would sort out the different editions.
Of course, for the average English-language work, you have the US edition, and the UK edition, and possibly an Australian or Canadian edition... and hard and softcover in both... and people have started giving ISBNs to some reprintings, or work on a "new cover art, new ISBN" model... or have the "anniversary edition" with identical text but new blurb be a new edition...
...it's insane.
There do exist such reference services for crosslinking. They're patchy, they're sometimes available and sometimes not, and they're going to be subjective* and incomplete for the forseeable future. I would *love* to see what Open Library can do with this, or suggestions for how we can help**.