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Why bother with trying to encode all this information in a number? Modern e-book formats (e-pub) have fairly good support for metadata in a simple to access form. Just use it for search engines.
The fundamental purpose of an id number is to unambiguously identify something. In the digital age, when books are so easily modifiable by users (they can convert, edit metadata, even insert content), it's pointless trying to uniquely identify anything. Instead ISBN should be used to point to the "canonical" digital edition of a particular logical book. That is the digital edition registered as authoritative by the author/publisher with the organization that administers ISBN.
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