After almost two years of work, the Book Industry Study Group has issued a policy statement of recommended best practices in assigning ISBNs to ebooks and other digital products, “in order to reduce both confusion in the marketplace, and the possibility of errors.” In general, the focus is on three main factors in deciding how many ISBNs to use: content, format, and usage rights. Substantial content variations–like enhancements–create a work that should have its own unique ISBN. They also recommend one ISBN for each file format. So EPUB, Mobi and PDF versions should have separate ISBNs as well. Finally, they […]
