If anyone is a little concerned/interested/confused by the impending 13-digit ISBN, the Book Industry Study Group has teamed up with our old pals at Wiley Publishing to offer ISBN-13 for Dummies. (By the way, does anyone else still bristle at being called a "dummy" when reading about MySQL or Robert's Rules of Order?) The pdf is just 21 pages and it appears to be geared more towards publishers than librarians, but the first few pages offer a nice overview of what's in store with ISBN-13. You may have noticed them lurking around a few versos already, and we can expect them to be fully rolled out around January 2007. My favorite bit of all this is that ISBN-13 for Dummies has, yep, you guessed it, a 13-digit ISBN!!! (978-0-555-02340-2, to be exact. You knew I'd check.)
I'm not really concerned about the 13-digit ISBN itself, it's the prospect of OCLC squeezing it into their existing 10-digit 020 field that gives me the willies. I'm sure that OCLC knows what it's doing and pretty soon everything will be fine, but at the moment we have to put it in the 024 field; which I have some reservations about, rather like wearing my sister's hand-me-down bell bottoms in 1986.
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