Why do some books have multiple ISBNs?

As described in this question books can have both, ISBN-10 and ISBN-13. In addition, however, some books have multiple ISBN-10:

Stochastic Processes: A Survey of the Mathematical Theory (Applied Mathematical Sciences) [Sep 01, 1977] Lamperti, J. ISBN: 0387902759 ISBN: 3540902759

Ordinary Differential Equations [Paperback] [Jul 01, 1997] Vladimir I. Arnol'd; Vladimir I. Arnold and Roger Cooke ISBN: 3540548130 ISBN: 0387548130

Why do these books have multiple ISBNs? Thanks!

Tim

• publishing
• identifiers
• isbn

Comments

Answer by Jakob

Each ISBN is assigned by a publisher. The publisher can buy ISBN ranges from an ISBN agency, which gets its ISBN prefix from the international ISBN agency. Based on these assigned ISBN ranges, one can read the parts of an ISBN. For instance the ISBNs from your example:

• 0-387-90275-9 = English agency - Springer - 90275 - check digit
• 3-540-90275-9 = German agency - Springer - 90275 - check digit

In this case Springer is a German publisher, so it belongs to the German agency (3-). Springer seems to have decided to assign two ISBNs because the book is English (0-), for better visibility or just because of some internal business rule. I'd bet that foreign books are less present in book stores and in libraries. With two prefixes for German countries and for English countries the publisher might have a slight advantange. Maybe the editor just insisted to get an English ISBN for his book.

By the way, OCLC provides a web service to decode ISBNs, for instance 0387902759 is:

{
    "isbn":["0-387-90275-9"],
    "area":"English speaking area",
    "publisher":"Springer",
    "city":"Berlin"
}

Comments

• Tim: Thanks! (1) can you point out which parts of 0-387-90275-9 means which? (2) It seems not all Springer books have two 10-digit ISBNs. For example, Representations of compact Lie groups by Brocker and tom Dieck has just one ISBM 3-540-13678-9. (3) The book in (2) also has ISSN 0072-5285. What does ISSN mean?
• dsalo: ISSN is to journals (the "s" stands for "serials") as ISBN is to books.
• Tim: @dsalo: But Representations of compact Lie groups by Brocker and tom Dieck is a book, not a journal.Why does it have ISSN?
• dsalo: Because it's part of the series "Graduate Texts in Mathematics" to which that particular ISSN refers. Book series as well as journals can receive ISSNs.