You don’t have to be a book enthusiast to be aware of the acronym ISBN, many people will have heard of it even if they have no knowledge of what it stands for. This year marks 50 years since the International Standard Book Number was rolled out worldwide. To celebrate we are taking a look at its history, which is far more interesting than a handful of numbers around a bar code have any right to be!

It was an unusual, and very British, affair beginning in the mid-sixties with a bookshop and a wartime code breaker. In 1965 the British bookseller and stationers W.H. Smith was constructing a giant warehouse and needed a system with which to catalogue the vast collection of books that existed, and more importantly for them was a way to efficiently do so with the use of computers. Previously there had been forms of cataloguing printed works but nothing particularly efficient. J. Whitaker and Sons, publisher of Whitaker’s Almanack, had been publishing British Books in Print since 1874 under the name of Reference Catalogue of Current Literature. These annual volumes were, exactly as the titles suggest, lists of publications which, although useful for reference, would not be particularly helpful to the more modern needs of the time. In stepped Frederic Gordon Foster, an Irish computer engineer and professor of statistics who had been recruited by MI6 during World War 2 to work on code breaking at the famous Bletchley Park. After the war, whilst lecturing at the University of Manchester, Foster met famous codebreaker Alan Turing who in turn asked Foster to aid his work on the Manchester Mark I computer. Foster used his knowledge and skills to create a 9 digit system known as Standard Book Numbering or SBN.

At first, there were some dissenting voices within the publishing world who were none too keen on change, however with a report written by Foster on the potential benefits of such a system the support soon outweighed the naysayers. The SBN system was rolled out in England during 1967 and by the end of 1967, all books printed in the UK had been numbered. In 1968 The International Organisation for Standardisation met in London to discuss adopting the British SBN for international use, the United States of America began to use the SBN the same year. This usage was approved and the IOS developed a 10 digit system based on Foster’s SBN, coming up with what we know as ISBN. This was implemented in 1970 and is now the global identifier for books used in over 150 countries.
The benefits of the ISBN are the unique codes given not only to each title but every edition and variant of each title excluding reprints. This huge searchable list allows the coding, tracking and searching of each publication whether it be first editions, paperbacks, international edition and even ebooks. The industry embracing the system has also led to numerous other fringe benefits such as bestseller lists which helps not only the industry but also the consumer. In 2007 the ISBN once again upgraded to a 13 digit numerical system (after running out of 10 digit combinations) to continue the exhaustive cataloguing of the ever-expanding publishing world and all thanks to a stationers’ need for modernisation with a little help from an Irish statistician.