I stumbled on this useful resource today and remembered some discussions in the area. We may already have it linked somewhere in the Wiki but just in case we haven't I thought I'd record it here:
ISBN Prefixes and Publisher Ranges
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5 comments:
I've seen that page, but that's only a link to publisher country: not particularly useful for our mostly-English pubs. Working on the ISFDB Publisher pages so we could spot the actual publisher ranges - e.g. "07221" is a sign of a "Sphere" imprint for many years (till it became an "Orbit" one) was beginning to get somewhere. And will be again once we get back at the data.
I'll second Bill's comments. I'm actually surprised there are no public ISBN Prefixes and Publisher Ranges lists. I have the impression you can buy the current list, at least for the USA, from R. R. Boker (www.bowker.com) but don't see anything obvious on their site.
The puzzle is why people have not gone ahead with creating their own publisher range lists. I've looked for them on and off and we could certainly construct one from ISFDB's verified data.
I know there's the problem with imprints, publishers getting aquired, and bad-data but it still seems quite doable.
Some people have tried, e.g. I came across this site for SF publishers particularly:
http://storypilot.com/sf/publishers.html
But I think ISFDB can do better. The value of the current list continually decreases as more and more imprints get assimilated into the Mega-Publishing Corporations - the value is probably in knowing who had what ranges, WHEN. Amazon data for the mid-1960s to the 1990s has already been poisoned by them back-filling CURRENT publisher information to publications from earlier days - e.g. Wizards of the Coast are getting credited for TSR Dungeons and Dragons books that they may be reprinting now, but certainly didn't at first publication (as they only bought TSR in 1997). And WotC are now just a subsidiary of Hasbro, I think... for book purposes, "0786" prefix ISBNs are a good start, "1560" prefix should be TSR... but the dates are the only way we'll make them positively useful.
I see what you mean, it's not even specific enough when it comes to identifying country. English speaking is very generic.
I do really like the new Publisher view though that shows the ISBNs all lining up neatly. With that view available coming up with a definitive publisher range list should be a lot more straightforward.
Actually, within the English, French, and German speaking ranges there are sub-ranges for the countries which in turn hand out sub-sub ranges to publishers. A while back I did a decoder for this but never had time to make it "publication ready." The ISBN-Decoder.txt file is the Visual Basic code and isbn-decoder.zip contains a spreadsheet that uses the code.
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