Books

ISBNs: an interesting data point

Lorcan

About a third of the print books in WorldCat have ISBNs.
Brian Lavoie provided me with this number based on the data extracted from WorldCat to support his joint work with Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka on the systemwide view of library collections. (Their presentation to CNI is available [ppt]; an article describing their results is forthcoming in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.)
At the time of that analysis, January 2005, there were 32 million print books in the system-wide collection represented by WorldCat. 10.5 million had ISBNs.
This is an analysis that would be worth repeating at some stage, given the increasing rate of growth of WorldCat.

Share
Comments
More from LorcanDempsey.net
icon

Lorcan Dempsey dot net

Deep dives and quick takes: libraries, society, culture and technology

Great! You’ve successfully signed up.

Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.

You've successfully subscribed to LorcanDempsey.net.

Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.

Success! Your billing info has been updated.

Your billing was not updated.