[Foundation-l] How many books are there in the world?

Fri Aug 6 02:19:52 UTC 2010

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 8:18 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
>> in particular, I didn't know that multiple books (entirely unrelated
>> books) have shared ISBNs. So, if nothing else, it might impact...
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISBN
>
> AFAIK, this is a fairly uncommon problem; I've never run across it in
> 6+ years of working with lots of books & library catalogs every day.

It varies by publisher--for example, in my experience, Harlequin (a
publisher of romance novels) seems to have used all of its ISBNs *at
least* twice. It's a real problem, if you expect an ISBN to be a
unique ID for a book, and worse if you wanted to it be unique to
edition or so on. Well, it's a minor issue from out point of view, I
guess. How would Mediawiki scale to 130 million articles? Gotta cover
everything...

-- 
Tracy Poff