Published: June 2, 2009

Assignment will lead to the gradual appearance of 979-prefixed ISBNs in the international book supply chain

The first 979-prefixed ISBN registration group element, 979-10, has been assigned to the Paris-based French National ISBN Agency, AFNIL, according to a special announcement today by the International ISBN Agency. The global book industry is encouraged to pay attention to this news: it will lead to the appearance of the first 979-prefix ISBNs in the international book supply chain.

The ISBN migrated from 10 to 13 digits in January 2007 in order to increase the capacity of the system and become compatible with the EAN-13 used for other products. The revised ISBN standard (ISO 2108) was published in 2005 and the implementation date for 13-digit ISBNs was January 1, 2007.

Larger agencies that currently have 1 or 2-digit group elements will start assigning 979-prefixed ISBNs when they exhaust their current supply of ISBNs. Smaller agencies, whose ISBN group elements are 3, 4 or 5 digits, will continue to be assigned 978-prefixed numbers as there is still plenty of capacity in these ranges.

Commenting on the announcement, Michael Healy, Executive Director of the Book Industry Study Group and the former Chairman of the ISO working group that revised the ISBN standard, said, "This is an important announcement for the U.S. book trade. Any systems remaining in the U.S. book trade that process only the last ten digits of an ISBN will have to be updated to avoid the possibility of duplicates of 978 and 979-prefixed ISBNs appearing in our supply chain."

The Book Industry Study Group created many educational resources in the run-up to January 1, 2007 that are still available on the BISG website.

In addition, the International ISBN Agency has made available an XML message providing information on all group elements and their associated prefixes at http://www.isbn-international.org/data/ranges/rangemessage.xml. The message will be continually updated as new prefixes and ranges are assigned. A human readable PDF version of ISBN ranges is also available from http://www.isbn-international.org/data/ranges/rangemessage-prefix.pdf.