Hooray for the ISBN: the importance and function of the ISBN in the new world of "books.".(Soapbox: The debate about how to use ISBNs for e-books has become surprisingly fierce)

As the digital landscape for books increases, new entrants to the market are puzzled by its insistence on the ISBN. To many--particularly e-book--only publishers--it seems that the industry is insisting on using an antiquated standard. Why can't the ISBN be adapted to include suffixes that describe different formats? What use is the ISBN on the Web, where there are no bar codes? And how is this 13-digit number useful in a Google-driven discovery environment?

The job of the ISBN is to identify a book. Whether that book is a paperback, hardcover, PDF file, EPub file--if it's going to be sold in the book supply chain, it needs an ISBN to identify it.

Metadata is …