Bookland (imaginary place)

Bookland is an imaginary place created in the 1980s in order to reserve an EAN Country Code for books, regardless of country of origin, so that the EAN space can catalog books by ISBN rather than maintaining a redundant parallel numbering system.

From the creation of the ISBN until January 1, 2007, the ISBN was a 9-digit number followed by a modulo 11 checksum that was either a digit or the letter X. A Bookland EAN was generated by concatenating the Bookland "country code" 978, the digits of the book's ISBN other than the checksum, and an EAN checksum digit.

Since parts of the 10-character ISBN space are nearly full, all books published from 2007 on are expected to use the 13-digit ISBN-13, which is identical to the Bookland EAN. At least one new "country code" (979) has been assigned to Bookland for expansion; books numbered with prefixes other than the initial 978 will not be mappable to 10-character ISBNs.

External links

* [http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/transition.asp Are you ready for ISBN-13?]
* [http://www.booksprice.com/ISBN13.jsp ISBN-13 transition web services]