Bibliographic information provider Bowker, US, a business unit of ProQuest, has reached an agreement with Google to provision and facilitate the assignment of ISBN numbers to Google Editions, Google’s digital book offering launching later in 2010. The agreement sets an important publishing industry precedent, helping to ensure a standards-driven framework for the identification of digital and print-on-demand book products made available and sold through Google Books. Bowker operates the U.S. ISBN Agency.
Under the agreement, Google will assign ISBN numbers to Google Editions in cases when book publishers have not assigned their own unique ISBNs to works they intend to make available for sale. Both Google and Bowker will encourage publishers to retain primary responsibility for assigning their own ISBNs to their respective Google Editions and including these records as part of the catalogue data they distribute to their trading partners.
One of the core principles of the ISBN Standard is that it identifies a unique and separately available edition of a book. This is as important for e-books as it is for different formats of printed books, especially where trading models involve multiple partners. For more than four decades, ISBN adoption across the supply chain has facilitated pinpointed discovery and acquisitions, e-commerce, distribution and aggregation of product information, and sales data reporting practices.
Recently, the International ISBN Agency issued a position paper reinforcing that publishers should assign ISBNs to each separately available e-book format and supply their ISBNs to downstream intermediaries and channels. The paper also recognised that there are instances of compressed supply chains where an e-book in a particular format is available exclusively through a single channel, such as Kindle and Amazon, and that in those circumstances there is no requirement for an ISBN.
Google Editions are claimed to be among a growing number of game-changing distribution and reading models available to publishers and book consumers. The service is projected to allow users to procure e-books from various websites via different devices, including Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle. While publishers have not yet publicly committed to participate in the new service, Google is unlikely to face problems here, since publishers have no reason to object to an increased number of retail outlets. Australian publishers, in a separate announcement, have welcomed Google’s decision to launch Google Editions. While it is remains unknown about when the service will become available in Australia, local response to the US announcement has been positive.
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