If you need to pull up book data for millions of books (e.g., from the standard information book title, author, and cover art to less conventional data such as book reviews and price info), where can you get it? By accessing a book database, obviously. In this article, we’ll review and analyze the most popular book databases (both paid and free) with relatively open APIs that can help you retrieve book information by ISBN.
There’s plenty of information about listing and selling regular ISBN-13 books. However, what about the books that don’t have an ISBN? How do you deal with them? For one thing, such old books may not have any value; for another, some out-of-print books can be rare collectibles you can sell quite profitably. Therefore, knowing how to find and evaluate as well as where to sell books from the pre-ISBN era is an advantage you can use as a bookseller.
The U.S. ISBN Agency has been assigning the 978 prefix to 13-digit ISBNs since 2007. In the previous articles, we’ve discovered what an ISBN is and explained the difference between 10- and 13-digit ISBNs and how both systems could be contained with the help of the 978 prefix. However, blocks of ISBN-13s built on existing ISBN-10s are exhausted. Therefore, the U.S. ISBN Agency has begun assigning ISBNs starting with the prefix element 979.
The creator of the ISBN on your book has an unbelievable life story. Learn more about the man behind the numbers, Emery Koltay.
What is it for, and where did it come from?
W. H. Smith, who was the largest single book retailer in Great Britain, became computerized and wanted a standard numbering system for all the books it carried. They constructed the Standard Book Numbering system (SBN), which was introduced in 1967. In 1970 the ISO, International Organization for Standardization, which consisted of several countries, adopted this standard system. It evolved into the ISBN numbering system and is now the standard in approximately 150 countries.
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