This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from September 2003 and lives here forevermore.

The ISBN it is a changing

Apparently the format of ISBNs is likely to change late next year. The length is going to change from 10 to 13 with the new ISBNs taking the same format as the current EAN. The reason for this happening is that we’re on the road to running out of ISBNs apparently, so we need to provide roughly a billion more for future expansion.

I can see this causing trouble for loads of people who don’t know about it and even for those that do. Validation code which appears all over the place will need to be rewritten. Places with code that relies on 10 character ISBNs will be in trouble, including a number of libraries I’m sure.

The reason this is of interest to me, is that I’ve got a library system for myself and Michele to store our list of books, and changes like this will affect that. Thankfully it’s all nicely abstracted so all I’ll have to do is update a module and everything should just work. The database is already setup to deal with ISBNs of longer than 10 characters, I don’t know why, maybe I was just thinking ahead!