On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 11:38:07AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
The simple answer is that they are incredibly useful, and that they are convenient. If there were some other number which uniquely identified books, rather than particular printings of books, I would support using those instead.
...and if any database would provide lookup based on them. It is maybe important to note that these places actually look up the books, so it's not just an ID but a searchable possiblity. (For example I could put barcodes in the articles about many things and nobody could use them anyway, since there are no places to look it up.)
I find ISBN (or any kind of working lookup, by the way) helpful.
(Just to note that there are supporters, too, but they maybe don't like to make that amount of noise :))
Peter