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Brian Green, Executive Director, International ISBN Agency
It seems a little strange writing about identification of e-books in Serials-eNews but, in the world of digital resources, traditional differences in dealing with monographs and serials are disintegrating and e-books are seen as simply another subscription product needing to be identified.
The ISBN standard (ISO 2108), revised in 2005, states that "each different format of an electronic publication that is published and made separately available shall be given a separate ISBN." This was discussed at some length during the standard revision process and, although a couple of publishers were unhappy about it, was widely agreed as desirable for the smooth running of the supply chain.
Libraries want each format of e-books uniquely identified, as do bibliographic agencies, booksellers and sales data services. This is, after all, a logical extension of separately numbering different print formats and facilitates discovery, description, acquisition and reporting. JISC Collections has said "Each e-book title should have a unique ISBN for its format and for its vendor. This is necessary to allow librarians to easily discover who is supplying e-books, in what format they are available and through which vendors they can acquire them."
So, what's the problem? Some publishers, including a few major US trade houses, only wish to assign a single ISBN to e-books, regardless of format. One argument is that the publisher, in many cases, only produces a single format - usually .epub, the XML-based standard file format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Third party distributors and reselling channels then create multiple formats, add DRM protection and make them available to their customers without the further involvement of the original publisher. Some publishers even claim that they are neither aware of, nor interested in, which formats their publications are converted to and do not want the overhead of creating and maintaining ONIX records for each format.
The result of this has been chaos in the library e-book world, where cataloguers find either the same ISBN on records for different formats or, in some cases, non-standard proprietary identifiers assigned by the aggregators. Bibliographic databases, mostly using ISBN as their key, are unable to list the different formats. Reporting sales and usage data becomes almost impossible and made-up 'quasi-ISBNs', sometimes duplicating legitimate ISBNs already assigned to other books, are appearing in the supply chain as so many trade and library systems cannot operate without ISBNs.
In response to appeals for help and to ensure the continuity of ISBN-based systems, the International ISBN Agency agreed last year that registrant prefixes may be assigned to e-book resellers to enable them to allocate ISBNs to individual e-book formats if, and only if, the publisher has not provided an e-book ISBN for each format.
The original publisher will appear in the bibliographic records that the resellers provide to the bibliographic agencies. If the publisher does provide separate ISBNs for each separate format, then these should always be used in preference to the reseller's ISBNs. This remains the correct procedure and the International ISBN Agency has joined with resellers, libraries and bibliographic agencies in calling on all publishers to provide their own ISBNs for assignment to each format of their e-books.
One possible problem with resellers assigning ISBNs is the likelihood that there will be more than one ISBN for similar formats of the same e-book coming from different aggregators. In point of fact, a single format (say PDF) from different aggregators frequently provides different functionality to users and is therefore, arguably, a different product. However, even if two identical products are assigned different ISBNs by their resellers, this has to be better than having no unique identification at all.
Managing the proliferation of different formats and DRM and linking all the available manifestations will, hopefully, be facilitated through the use of the new ISO standard for identifying the underlying content, the International Standard Text Code (ISTC), further details of which can be found at www.istc-international.org.
To conclude, if libraries want unique identification of different e-book formats then the desirable solution is for publishers to assign their own ISBNs to each format. As customers for e-books, libraries, and especially major consortia, are in a strong position to insist that publishers assign ISBNs in this way. The problem seems to be that libraries are largely dealing with intermediaries and that the message is not always getting back to the publishers, some of whom seem to believe that standard identifiers are not necessary for e-books.
(This article was prompted by a series of exchanges on UKSG's Lis-e-resources about whether ISBNs can be relied upon to be unique or not, reported in Serial-eNews in April. It should also be noted that the scope of UKSG has widened to include all e-resources.)
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