alt Hacker NewsConverse problem: ISBN re-use:
"Officially, ISBNs should never be reused. However, problems can happen if:
- A publisher improperly reuses an ISBN
- A small or self-publisher mis-registers a book
- An ISBN agency error occurred
- A book was published before 2007 and conversion from ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 created confusion" [Source: ChatGPT]
In 2009, I had plans to use ISBNs to distinguish the books in my personal library. But after scanning some ISBN bar codes with a MacBook app, I discovered some codes were associated with different books (the app also pulled the cover art, so it was easy to spot). Never had the time to find out if the bar code scanning was defective (=did not use the check sum) or these were cases of assignment errors, which "shouldn't happen" but have already happened.
There is a certain type of ignorant developer who reused "unique IDs", I've even seen a database in production use where GUIDs were recycled (no joke).
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Regarding your issues with ISBNs in your personal library, I suspect you must either have had an issue with your lookups/app, or you had several books from a (almost certainly tiny/amateur) publisher who improperly reused ISBNs. I've spent some time working at a bookstore with 80,000+ different ISBNs and I can count the number of issues with ISBN re-use we encountered on one hand.
We'd put pricing barcodes on every book in the store, and those were always based on the ISBNs and had the titles and authors printed on them, which was info that came from ISBN lookups either from Bowker's Books-In-Print data or Ingram's data. We'd print the barcodes in large batches and then have to match them to the books based on the title and author shown and verify with the ISBN, so all 80,000+ were checked, and the actual ISBN issues were _extremely_ rare and always from a _very_ small/amateur publisher.
Anyone who decided to make a catalogue for any decent enough library found that out on the first day.
(By “decent enough” I mean breadth. If you are strictly collecting some genre products from a small number of commercial publishers, you might be in the walled garden where everything just works.)
SBNs were introduced when, in addition to existing mass production, mass accounting and storage management for each item became possible (with computers). Outside of the centrally controlled environments they don't work well, or mean much. Sure, national authorities make enough rules about having proper ISBNs, but they do get ignored.
There are small university/gallery/collective publications that have bigger print runs than “official” books on some specific topic. There are books that are uniquely made or uniquely altered, and therefore can't share the identifier with another item. Most common example is getting an autograph — you probably want to know precisely where you've put the copy of Bible signed by the author, not just any other Bible that looks the same. Some people oppose ISBNs for political reasons, and either ignore them, or invent bogus numbers.
Then there's International aspect. Soviet Union, for example, did not use ISBNs until the very last of its years. There are still many books printed there — including complete works every scholar needs to reference — that never had any ISBNs.
Some works have been published for that last time a century ago. Some of them might had been immensely popular back in the days, but now they are forgotten. Others have been re-printed, but you've managed to get the first printed edition, a small book of then-unknown author. Those also won't have ISBNs.
So the idea itself that any book must be an interchangeable product from the batch in which each item has the same effect, and therefore can have the same identifier, is a bit narrow.
Obviously, professional librarians could instantly tell you that ISBN is merely one of the search markers, and is not the way the inventory is kept.