"HeyBub" <heybub@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:5a6dnfsfC7ChHr3VnZ2dnUVZ_smnnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 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?"
Thanks for posting this. Informative, interesting, and VERY amusing... :-)
Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."
>
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