ISBNs gone wrong

Archive: Online bookselling

I bitched earlier about inaccurate ISBNs, I find myself hit by one I didn't catch.

There's a commonplace book, we'll call it The Ordinary Book (don't want the title to be indexed in search engines). Last week a guy in Canada ordered a copy. When we spoke on the phone he seemed weirdly delighted to get the book. He said that the edition that I had was normally sold for much more. Other things were on my mind and customers often have queer opinions. I didn't think anything about it.

Yesterday I noticed my partner had cataloged yet another copy of The Ordinary Book. The entry in Homebase said The Ordinary Book (The Spiffy Edition). Copying the ISBN and going to Amazon the book was as cheap as ever. No spiffy in the title. That doesn't mean much. The titles that Homebase and Amazon bring up often differ, though Amazon is usually the one with more words.

Trying ABE I discover that there is a Spiffy Edition. Or to stop being coy, an illustrated edition. Well our edition is illustrated: a bunch of boring drawings scattered through the text. But the proper illustrated edition is about twice as thick and has a couple of hundred photographs. Not to mention uncommon and far more costly.

Oh damn.

I emailed the customer and explained our mistake to him, asking him to return the book unopened. We'll be out the cost of postage to Canada for each trip. That'll be more than we sell the book for.

Presumably ABE and Amazon buy the ISBN data from Bowker. I've sometimes wondered why they often differ. As I said many times Amazon will have a longer title. And one but not the other will have the wrong title. Not just the wrong edition but a wholly different book.

One small difference would be that ABE has the Canadian recension of the data (since the American editions of the books weren't published in Toronto). Mostly I haven't cared. But today it cost me money.