tlmfru wrote:
> The EAN is actually an upgrade of the current 12-digit UPC scheme.
> The ISBN13 is a way of using the current ISBN as a UPC. I thought
> you were joking when you spoke of "Bookland" but it's true! 979 will
> be used as a prefix "when the current numbers run out", whatever that
> means, and 977 is for periodicals presently under the ISSN.
"Joking?" The book business is rapidly approaching 1950. We don't joke
about
things like that. There is only ONE major publisher in the United States
that owns a printing press (Doubleday for its Anchor Bible series). There
are over 3,000 trim sizes for hardbound books. Book jackets are applied by
hand. Unsold mass-market books are destroyed in situ because it's cheaper
to
burn 'em than to print another.
See if you can lay hands on "Cyberbooks" by Ben Bovi - a thinly disguised
spoof of the book business. In the book you meet the Chinese mathematician
who discovers that under rare, but nevertheless clearly defined,
cir***stances, the formula by which royalty payments are made can actually
be understood and therefore must be changed! I got a kick out of the
publisher that put robotic picking machines in their warehouse to gather
book cartons off the shelves. Due to some misunderstanding, the robots
could
only reach to the fifth shelf but the warehouse had racks of seven
shelves.
The company then hired midgets to ride around atop the picking machines to
access the higher shelves. Of course the midgets were constantly falling
off
the robots and getting run over...
Or the accounting consultant who computd that by changing the glue used in
perfect bindings the company could save five cents per hundredweight.
Unfortunately, this new glue formulation decomposed in ****pment causing
not
only the pages to become loose but the va****s from the decomposition
formed
an hallucinogenic gas that, when inhaled by the hippies in the bookstore's
receiving department, caused them to strip ****d and run about the store
yelling "flying turtles are real - they just don't show up on radar!"
>
It's worse. The EAN believes in an optional, additional, digit (making 14
in
all) to indicate packing quantity.
Example:
No leading digit = single can of armadillo-flavored chili
1 = case of 12 cans
2 = pallet of 50 cases
3 = truck load of 22 pallets
4 = ****pping container of 3 truck loads
Each of these will have a different check-digit.
Fortunately, in the book business, this silliness is irrelevant.
Publishers
traditionally assign a different ISBN/EAN to each packing quantity,
leading
often to "You ordered 3 PALLETS of 'Collectable Locomotives' ?!! Have you
been sniffing ****pping cartons again?"
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