1. Are you sure you have the
right copy?
Identifying E-Books with ISBN
Todd A. Carpenter, NISO Executive Director
Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting
May 31, 2012 - Arlington,VA

2. About
• Non-profit industry trade association
accredited by ANSI
• Mission of developing and maintaining
technical standards related to information,
documentation, discovery and distribution
of published materials and media
• Volunteer driven organization: 400+ spread
out across the world

3. NISO Portfolio
• ISSN
• Paper Permanence
Where the library,
• RFID in Libraries
publishing and
• OpenURL automation
suppliers converge
• DOI
• SUSHI
Greatest focus on
• KBART interoperability
• SERU

4. The Community

5. 32% Libraries/Library 35 % Publishers/Publishing
Organizations! Organizations!
36 LSA Members !
(non-voting)!
ANSI!
ISO!
Other SDOs!
33% Library Systems Suppliers,
Publishing Vendors & Intermediaries!
NISO’s Community

6. NISO Internationally
Actively participate internationally with ISO, EDItEUR,
IFLA, ICSTI, International STM Association, CODATA,
UK Serials Group, LIBER, Standards Australia, IETF,
ISO Registration Authorities

7. Technical Committee (TC) 46
Information & Documentation
Subcommittees (SC):
4 – Systems Interoperability
8 – Performance Measurement
9 – Identification & Description
11 – Records Management
NISO manages the Secretariat of ISO TC 46, SC 9

8. Standards are familiar, even if you don’t notice
Image: DanTaylor Image: : Joel Washing

9. Key Concepts in
Standardization

10. The Referent
The thing
being
identified

11. The Identifier
The string
identifying
the referent

12. The Metadata
The data
that
describes
the referent

13. An ID & its metadata
• Identifiers can be but are not necessarily
names (often better if they aren’t)
• IDs can be but need not be human-
readable. They also may or may not be
human understandable.
• Metadata describe attributes of the
referent
• Not every attribute need be described

14. Functional Granularity

15. Functional Granularity
You ID an item at the
level at which it makes
sense for your business
needs to identify that item

16. A lesson in functional granularity

17. How do these things
apply in my life?
Identifying Ebooks

18. When is a new thing a new thing?

19. What make one ebook
different from another?

20. E-book characteristics
Encoding structure possibilities (file formats)
Platform dependencies (different devices)
Reflowable (resize)
Mutable (easily changed/updated)
Chunked (the entire item or only elements)
Networkable (location isn’t applicable)
Actionable/interactive
Linkable (to other content)
Transformable (text to speech)
Multimedia capable
Extensible (not constrained by page)
May operate under license terms (not copyright)
Digital Rights Management (DRM)

21. “Different product forms (e.g. hardcover,
paperback, Braille, audio-book, video, online
electronic publication) shall be assigned
separate ISBNs. Each different format of an
electronic publication (e.g. “.lit”,“.pdf”, “.html”,
“.pdb”) that is published and made separately
available shall be given a separate ISBN.”
ISO 2108: 2007 - Information & Documnetation
-- International Standard Book Number

22. ISBN-13 for E-books
When should a new version get a new ISBN?
PDF? HTML? EPUB? MOBI? KINDLE?
If a publisher refuses to assign one, can a supplier; such as
Baker & Taylor, Ingram, or Google?
Metadata bloat – 1 book, with 15 chapters
Sold separately available in 5 formats + HC, SC, PoD
Potentially 78 ISBNs assigned to one book

23. THERE IS
NO SUCH THING
AS AN E-ISBN
There are only ISBNs asigned
to ebooks (OK?)

24. Industry recommendations
released in 2011
------
International ISBN Agency
Guidelines for the assignment of ISBNs to e-books
&
Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
POL-1101: Best Practices for Identifying Digital Products

25. Simply put:
Each file a publisher
produces for external
distribution gets an
ISBN

26. Thank you!
Todd Carpenter, Executive Director
tcarpenter@niso.org
National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
One North Charles Street, Suite 1905
Baltimore, MD 21201 USA
+1 (301) 654-2512
www.niso.org