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Topic: Cat. no / series no.

26th Nov 2015, 1:08 PM
	ppint. Member since Aug 2012 6393 Points	- almost all paperback publishers from penguin books onwards allocated their own, unique within the publishing house, cat#s to the titles they published. - when "sbn" (standard book numbers) started being introduced, by uk publishers, some prepended their new publisher id code to some obvious derivative of the previously allowed cat#s shorn of any alphabetic character(s) - e.g. tandem books ltd° (juvenile imprint, target books) did this, using their prefix 426- and running up a string of 0s between this and their cat# to extend the prefix-plus-0s-plus-cat# to the required sbn length. - and some did not. - merkin paperback publishers took their time to adopt a rival system, the american book number, whose allocated publisher prefixes proceeded to duplicate the prefixes allocated in the sbn system. - again, some generated abns from their previously-allocated cat#s by some similarly obvious systematic system - and some did not. - eventually merkin publishers adopted the sbn - with new publisher prefixes unique to them, which sbn, prefixed initially by a 0 (& later, also a 1) indicating the book is in english°°, became the isbn (international standard book number) beloved of librarians°°° everywhere - the ten-digit isbn, that is, whose final numeric character is a check-digit which indicates that the previous nine digits have been accurately transcribed - or not. - with the merglobalisation of formerly distinct distribution chains (or octopi), three more digits, 978-, have been prepended to the isbn-10 to produce the isbn-13, which necessarily ends with a different numerical character from that of the isbn-10 as the initial 978- upsets the previously-calculated check-digit of the isbn-10. - books published in a series that have been given their own internal series numbering will not usually record, reflect or reflect this in any way in their publisher's cat#s, nor their sbns, abns, isbns, isbn-10s or isbn-13s - unless the publisher has chosen to allocate them cat#s in sequence, and in a sequence sufficiently long to include titles not yet written as later appear; and even then, the isbn(-10 or -13)'s check-digit system is virtually guaranteed to put the kybosh on any such attempt. - on top of which, such series may from time to time suffer renumberings, e.g. the lancer (merkin) & sphere (yuk) books conan series, and the penguin (puffin), later collins (lions), narnia series. - yr hmbl srppint. suggests that the notes: section is probably the best place to indicate both the membership of, and the ordinal place(s) of a title in, such series. ° - aka universal-tandem, for a while sister company of the universal publishing inc. of new york who'd bought galaxy, if, worlds of tomorrow, worlds of fantasy magazines and galaxy books from robert m. guinn, and who published award paperbacks °° - or in merkin english, which is presumed to be sufficiently close to english for mutual comprehension - for these purposes °°° - ook!