Can one ISBN indicate two books? (Do ISBN's get reused?)

Factual Questions
1

So I have this ISBN - 9780393073775 - that googling shows as being the number of two books:

The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal (sounds cool! want!).

The Storm Has Many Eyes by Henry Cabot Lodge, which sounds so boring I fell asleep typing the name here.

Is this possible? The 10 digit ISBN, 0393073777, does the same thing.

The Lodge book is from 1973, at the dawn of ISBN numbers, so I wonder if it was some early inconsitency. Or do they reuse ISBN’s? I wouldn’t think so.

I demand to know how this happened.

2

ISBNs would not normally get re-used by different publishers that those to which the range was originally allocated (I don’t think they’re actually meant to be re-used even within publisher, but I expect it has happened).

Looks like one of these records is an error - probably actually printed wrong on one of the books - because everyone appears to be conflating the two.

I thought it might be the case that one of them should have been a 979 ISBN, but apparently not.

All old ISBN-10s can be converted to ISBN-13s by prefixing ‘978’ and recalculating the check digit - however, there is a new range of ISBN-13s, which begin ‘979’ which are ISBN-13 only and do not relate to any ISBN-10 (and the purpose of doing this was precisely because the supply of existing ISBNs was running out).

3

Heh. Follow your link for the Lodge book, and read the “about the book” description (as well as “customers who bought this”).

4

That’s probably because the system is using ISBN as the unique identifier field in their database (bad practice, but it happens a lot).

5

also the bonobo book page under ‘More About the Authors’ has a link to their listings on Lodge.

6

I can’t add anything to the whole ISBN question here, but I can say, this line was pretty funny.

7

Yeah. It’s a problem because so many sites (including PaperbackSwap.com, where I want to order the bonobo book) use ISBN as the identity key for a book.

Maybe the ‘ISBN typo on the book’ theory is good - presumably for the 1973 book. I’ll see what other ISBN’s that book has.

8

Thanks. I’m insecure about my jokes. I try to be funny a lot here, but Vinyl Turnip and **Sampiro **get all the praise. I never know if I’m funny or annoying.

9

On further investigation, I can’t actually tell if the second book in the list (first published) is from the same publisher - the conflation of ISBN is making it hard to search.

If they are both from the same publisher, it just means they re-used a number from their allotted range - perhaps accidentally

10

Ah. Yes, they are both printed by W. W. Norton.

For the Bonobo book, I looked at the title page through the* Look Inside!*** feature at amazon.

For the Vietnam book, I base it onthis review in the International Journal in 1974.

11

How is that bad practice? I thought that was the whole point of the ISBN.

12

In DB/system design, it’s generally bad practice to use as a unique identifier any value that has meaning in the real world.

The two books in this thread are in fact a perfect example of why not - real world values that are supposed to be unique sometimes turn out not to be unique, and then, suddenly, your system can’t deal with them..

Using ISBN as a unique record ID in a database of books is an especially sore point for me - I inherited maintenance responsibility of just such a system just a short while before the industry switched to ISBN-13 - and migration was a nightmare, for several reasons:
[ul]
[li]The ISBN field in about a dozen tables needed to be changed to accommodate more digits[/li][li]The values in the ISBN field in all tables needed to be converted to ISBN-13[/li][li]The validation of the check digit on this field had to be changed to the formula appropriate for ISBN-13[/li][/ul]
-None of these things is especially difficult, they’re just not the sort of things you ever want to be doing to the primary IDs in a database - its much better to use purely synthetic record IDs, then store things like ISBN, title, author, etc in other columns - and just add a new column when you have a new bit of data to store against each book.