eBooks: Why they break ISBNs
Stuart Yeateshttp://www.nzetc.org/
Digital Publishing
It's different from print publishing
Who we are
Unit of the Victoria University library
Digital (re)publisher of documents used in teaching, learning
and research
TEI/XML, tomcat/cocoon/XSLT
Out-sourced digitisation
In-house authority control
Demo 1
Search ture pooti
Demo 2
Search William Williams
Demo 3
Search Robin Hyde
ePubs
Open standard for eBooks
A zip file of all the same stuff you can put on a static
website
DAISY metadata for naviation
XHTML, CSS, etcWe create ePubs by crawling our website
Device not page does navigation
grep dimensioned measurements from CSS
ISBNs
Widely used in the print world to track editions
Issued to publishers by a bureaucracy
Used end-to-end in supply chain
Printing, wharehousing, distribution, wholesaling, retailing,
purchase, cataloging, circulation,
Print Runs
99% of the time in traditional prublishing ISBNs are print run
identifiers
Print runs are extraordinarily expensive
Print runs are a speculative gamble on the part of
publishers
Print runs have no direct analogue in the pure-digital model
What's an edition?
Currecting a single-character OCR error?
Authority control change in body?
Authority control change in metadata?
Decreasing image quality?
Increasing image quality?
Factual corrections?
What's an edition?
It doesn't matter because all non-commercial ePubs are digital
photocopies and don't quality for ISBNs anyway.
What kind of identifier do we need?
Free of bureaucracy
Arguments about what an book / eBook is
Arguments about what an edition is
Arguments about jurisdiction (cloud, ISO, etc)
Baked-in assumptions about who produces what, why and for
whom
$$$ to support
Enormously plentiful
Many more things appear to qualify as eBooks than books
ISBNs are being reused
Versions / updatesNZETC: 1300 works x regenerated monthly
Nave hashes insufficient
Use an hash of the ePub as the identifier
Needs to be an identifier not the identifier
The identifer can't be used within the ePub
Many tools in the tool chain alter the ePub
Questions
Does a bookseller's sticker on a book make it a different
book?
Does an author's signature?
Does the intended market?
