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Originally Posted by Alisa
So would the nine digit code identify the book + publisher or other edition information? I ask because a book may have printings from different publishers. You see this a lot with Public Domain books. Since anyone can publish them you will find the same type of format from multiple sources. How many paperback versions of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens have you seen? Lots. Even with ebooks, I could find you several different copies of many classics in the same format put together by different people.
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The nine digit ID Number would just identify the story itself. As an example, no matter who releases "Silas Marner" by George Elliot, the nine digit number would be the same. The other parts of the universal book ID number just provide more information so you can better have search results. As it is described, it would allow you to easily find versions of the book in your own language.
One of the reasons that this is interesting to me is that I'm a comic book collector, and often it is very confusing to track many comic book series. For example, many series (such as Superman, Wonder Woman, Legion Of Super-Heroes, Fantastic Four, and The Doom Patrol) have multiple number one issues (Legion Of Super-Heroes alone has at least four number one issues). Added to this are the out-of-order issue numbers (in one month all comics published by DC Comics were numbered "0" and in another month they were all numbered "1,000,000" regardless of the previous and next issue number). It makes it very difficult to keep track of many series, and I might need a tracking system like I previously mentioned just make sense of it all.