2 May

An unnoticed revolution in books

1966 There are many industry-transforming events in the evolution of the book. Printing (the manuscript codex book existed centuries before Gutenberg) is one. The Queen Anne copyright law of 1710 another. The papier-mâché stereotype process in the early 19th century a third. Computer typesetting and offset printing in the 1970s a fourth. One such event, however, tends to slip by unnoticed.

On this day, Professor E. Gordon Foster of the London School of Economics published a pilot study, commissioned by the Publishers’ Association, which concluded that ‘there is a clear need for the introduction of standard numbering, and substantial benefits will accrue to all parties therefrom’.

It struck a chord. As Ted Striphas records in his monograph, The Late Age of Print (2009): ‘Within a year sixteen hundred British publishers agreed to the new coding system, dubbed the Standard Book Number (SBN).’ America (led by the Library of Congress, charged with catalogue control of the national book supply and archive) ‘similarly longed for a precise universally recognized coding system’. The ISBN (international SBN) was introduced in 1967.

As Striphas explains: ‘It should be emphasised that the ISBN isn’t merely a glorified stock number. Rather, it’s a carefully conceived, highly significant, and mathematically exact code that contains detailed information about the identity of each book.’

Together with the machine-readable barcode (Universal Product Code, UPC), which allowed EPOS (electronic point-of-sale system), introduced ten years later, the ISBN rationalised the book industry globally. It represented a new lease of life for walk-in stores (which could now minimise stock-holding wastage and delivery times) and made possible electronic bookstores such as Amazon. If the traditional book has a future, it is thanks to two acronyms largely invisible to the average consumer (ISBN, UPC). There is safety, as always, in numbers.