In the 1870s R.R. Bowker began publishing The American
Catalog which collected publisher titles into one compendium book. The
first edition of this book was surprisingly large, but its most useful aspect
was that it organized publisher books into a usable format. The concept was
not sophisticated: The Bowker team gathered publisher catalogs, bound and
reprinted them so that they were more or less uniform. In subsequent years Books
In Print became three primary components: The Subject Guide, Author Guide
and Publisher Index (or PID). Each was separated into distinct parts, but it
was the PID which held everything together.
When a user found a title in the author or subject index
they would also be referred to the PID index to find specific information about
the publisher including (the obvious) how to order the book. At some point,
Bowker began applying an alphanumeric “Bowker Id” to Publisher names so that
the database could be organized around the publisher information.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the ISBN was introduced
to the US retail market and Bowker was (and still is) the only agency able to
assign ISBN numbers in the US. Included in the ISBN syntax was a “publisher”
prefix such that a block of numbers could be assigned specifically to one
publisher. The idea, while good in concept, did not work well in practice. For
example, in an effort to encourage adoption of ISBNs the agencies assigned some
large publishers a small two digit publisher prefix which resulted in a very large
block of individual ISBNs (seven digits plus the check digit). Even after 50
years, many of these blocks are only partially used (and wasted) because the
publisher output was far less than anticipated. A second problem was that
publishers, imprints and lists were bought and sold which made a mess of the
whole idea. (In the above image the prefix is 4 digits).
At Bowker, we recognized that our Publisher Information
Database was a crown jewel and a key component of our Books In Print
database. Despite many requests we never licensed this data separately and this
was a significant reason retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Follett
and others licensed Books In Print. Because the information was so
important, we spent a lot of time maintaining the accuracy and the structure of
the data.
Publishers who acquired ISBNs from the Bowker agency were a key input to this database
– beginning in the 1980s but continuing to the present. Not all new ISBNs go to
small independent publishers and there remains consistent demand from
established publishers for new numbers even today. To be useful, this publisher
information needs to be structured and organized accurately and is only
possible with continued application of good practice. During my time at Bowker,
the editorial team met regularly with publishers to both improve the timeliness
and accuracy of their book metadata but also to confirm their corporate structure.
We wanted to ensure that all individual ISBNs rolled up to the correct imprint,
business unit and corporate owner. This effort was continuous and sometimes
engaged the corporation’s office of general counsel and was frequently detailed and time
consuming.
A few years after I left Bowker, one of my consulting clients
presented me with a proof of concept to programmatically create a publisher id
database. In concept it looked possible to do; however. I pointed out all the
reasons why this would become difficult to complete and then to maintain. They
went ahead anyway but after a year or so abandoned the work because they
could not accurately disambiguate publisher information nor confirm corporate
reporting structures.
Today there is no industry wide standard publisher id code
but the idea comes up frequently as one the industry should pursue. As with
many new standards efforts it will be the roll out and adoption of the standard
which will prove difficult. Establishing an initial leap forward could represent
a promising start by using data which might already be available or available
for license.
Bowker (and all global ISBN agencies) are required to
publish all new publisher prefixes each year and this information could also be
a useful starting point. Bowker is not the only aggregator with publisher data
(we were just the best by a significant margin) and another supply chain
partner might be willing to contribute their publisher data as a starting point.
This could establish a solid foundation to build on, but realistically any
effort will fail if the maintenance aspect of the effort is not understood and recognized,
and a strong market imperative isn’t widely agreed and supported.
When (I)SBN was launched in the UK in the late 1960s it
succeeded because the largest retailer (W.H. Smith) enforced the
strong business case for its adoption. Globally ISBN has gone on to become one
of the most successful supply chain initiatives in (retail) history and the
entire industry is dependent on this standard. (It has even survived Amazon’s
cynical ASIN). If there is a business case for the publisher id this needs to
be powerful, obvious and accord universal benefits: Mutual interest and money can
be powerful motivators but having a policeman like W.H. Smith will help as
well.
More:
The ISBN is Dead
ChapGPT "thoughts" on the history of identifiers.
Note: I ran R.R. Bowker for a while and was also Chairman of ISBN International.
In
this 170 page report we cover many operational and functional areas
served by these companies including Order to Cash, Financials, Title
(Product)
Management, Contract Rights and Royalties, Editorial, Production and
Scheduling, Subscription Management, Digital Asset Management, Digital
Asset Distribution and Content Management Services. 
