Enjoyed reading “The ISBN as SKU”, Peter Brantley’s blog post on how publishers may deal with having intermediaries (e.g. resellers) assign their own ISBNs to specific editions or variants of a work, possibly without the publisher’s knowledge:
“Already, publishers are making a single EPUB digital book package, and then leaving the proliferation of more discrete ebook reader formats to intermediaries, distributors and wholesalers. Ingram will make the XYZ, Amazon will make the Kindle format, etc. The publisher is only responsible for one file, the .epub package…We are rapidly jerking forwards into a near term future where ISBNs will be assigned for derivative digital book products by intermediaries, not publishers. As an astute colleague observed in New York, the ISBN becomes a product SKU.” (More…)
The followup comments from folks in and around the book trade are particularly interesting.
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Posted by Anirvan
