A poll

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Poll #1936936]

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Other option -- Dashes are expensive, dammit!

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

Not really - they can mine as many as they need out of the slushpile.

--Dave

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

to make them even smaller and harder to read, and if Cats were in charge, they would put them in with their claws..

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

I am given to understand that the dashes indicate how large a block of ISBNs you've purchased, which in turn indicates how large a publisher you are, which is not always to your advantage.

In consequence, there's selective pressure to put the dash in a misleading place (making one appear the greater publishing house), and a response of leaving the dashes out entirely, since that scotches the utility of the first approach.

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

I think people who both care and are in the know (one is probably a subset of the other) can tell just by looking.

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

I can, but I'm a librarian. It's amazing what an ISBN can tell you.

[seawasp]

The Gostak distims the Dashes!

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

+1.

I regret that Livejournal gives me no greater ... well no, I just don't want to try and see how exactly I could mess up this reply by putting the +1 in a larger font.

--Dave, having furrier green ideas

[vass]

Enabling their cats to live lives of ignorance, sloth, malevolence, and boundless sensuality.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a feathery thing on an elastic tied to a stick which I need to wave in front of my cat, so that in the space of a minute she can blink puzzledly at it, wave one paw in its vague direction, then all of a sudden go VOOM at it and destroy it, and then languidly roll on her back to expose her belly.

[azurelunatic]

I would bet that ancient and difficult to configure computer software is involved, along with the long-suffering hatred of at least one administrative professional.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

This wouldn't surprise me. "Example Books computerized in 1988, with our continuing commitment to leading edge technologies! Hold on a second while I start up the Windows 3.1 emulator...ah, yes, here's your ISBN. Enjoy!"

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, the dashes don't mean anything for a given ISBN13 - the meat is in the characters, and the dashes are only useful for breaking the number up into easily-typed chunks.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Same here. Well, in the tens anyway. Though the first four meant the publisher and there was usually one there. This is back when booksellers were first getting computers. But we already could ten key the till and the calculaters (for the buying of books) so we had a pretty easy time entering stuff in the computer.

[deor.livejournal.com]

Actually, the dashes break up the geographic indicators, the publisher block, the book's identifier, and the check digit. For instance, Oxford University Press is 978-0-19-blah-blah, the "19" block after the 0 showing the publisher. It may not confuse computers - an ISBN can be read as a unique set of digits either way - but the lack of dashes severely limits the human ability to distinguish the publisher at a glance for those who are involved enough with books to be able to do that (booksellers, librarians, booknerds, etc.)

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been working on a book-related website, and the isbn13 values we get have no dashes in them.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The ISBNs of MLP books should use rainbow dashes.

[seawasp]

We should kill you for that. But that's a horse of a different color.

[rdmasters.livejournal.com]

Even when it is the same horse...

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

To show that they're the most awesome dashes in Ponyville!

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I don't actually believe my answer, but the opportunity to combine sloth, malevolence, and boundless sensuality should never be passed up.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Agreed! Though the combination is easier to achieve with cats.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

It's pretty much the perfect definition of the feline character.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Because the bar code is the only bit that needs to be accurate for their purposes.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

The publishers tried to put them in but the cats thought they'd look better on the floor where the cats could play with them. Eventually the publishers just gave up trying to put them in.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Because members of their staff at some point in the past could never remember where to put their dashes and got confused and irritable when they tried to check it by looking at other publishers' dashes and they finally just said "screw it, if they want dashes they can put them themselves."

And since this happened longer ago than last Tuesday, it is a tradition now.

A complaint

[rdmasters.livejournal.com]

What about the publishers who put in excessive dashes?

Is there some secret En-Dash trading going on? What is the going rate for En-Dashes?

What about Em-Dashes? Is there a conversion rate?


(Exits to investigate futures trading in semi-colons.)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The belief that only machines bother to read ISBNs in the first place, and they read the zebra code so dashes would be superfluous.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I am pleased to see that "Cats" have pulled ahead in the poll.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

I wasn't aware the dashes in an ISBN even mattered. Can you have ISBNs with the same digits but different dash positions?

[deor.livejournal.com]

No - each set of digits is unique. As far as a computer cares, it could have dashes after every digit, or none, and it would be the same.

But without the dashes, you can't easily tell which is the publisher block (the bit right after the XXX-X beginning code), and it makes transcribing ISBNs by hand - for instance for ordering books for a library - much more difficult. When getting one digit wrong means you've ordered the wrong book (or none at all), having the dashes in makes it far less difficult for a human to read and to be sure they're getting it right, as opposed to an undifferentiated mess of 13 digits.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. I'm surprised if libraries don't have a common API for that though.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

My complaint is that I'm merely unwilling to assign _boundless_ amounts of sensuality to any given publisher. Arbitrarily large amounts, sure. But...

--Dave