This falls into the department of “little decisions with major ramifications”. While most of the industry maneuvers through vacations and sales conferences, there is a fight brewing between publishers, standards agencies, and other interested parties about ISBNs and eBooks.
ISBN agencies, sales reporting agencies, bibliographic aggregators and others, want a single ISBN for each format that an eBook takes. One for Sony BBeB, one for regular Mobipocket, one for Kindle, one for .epub, and so on. Many publishers want to give one ISBN for everything “e-“. Now Nielsen Book, the UK bibliographic aggregator, has said that they will not list eBooks in their database unless they are “one-ISBN-per-format”. A tempest in a standards teapot, you say? Not so fast. See below…
ISBN’s On All Formats [personanondata—note the response from Bowker in the comments section]
Nielsen backs ISBN e-book Standard [The Bookseller]
