Marvellously wrongheaded, most books published after 1970 have ISBN numbers
and are most easily found an purchased if you start with that number
(although it can get complicated as books are reprinted under diffent
numbers). The general practice in the bookselling business currently relies
on the ISBN number and will for the forseeable future.
Fred an ABE bookseller
From: Axel Boldt <axelboldt(a)yahoo.com>
Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2003 17:22:46 -0800 (PST)
To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] ISBN links
I know that I have fought and lost this fight before. ISBN numbers are
evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
books.
If versions of a book are being published by different parties, as is
true for many important books that are in the public domain, then
ISBN's are furthermore inherently POV, since they pick out a single
publisher.
No reference work, encyclopedia, library catalog, bibliography, article
or book ever refers to books by ISBN number. Because they are not book
identifiers. Given properly formatted author and title, our software
could and should query bookstores and libary catalogs.
I think I said it before: meaningless numbers are worse than no
numbers.
Axel
WikiKarma:
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_number
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