RE: As an aside, a possibly interesting read....

Also +1, and also thanks, Phil, for the excellent elaboration.

Re Laura's point 2: Phil is correct, the BISG ID committee did an excellent job of explaining this. But unfortunately, Laura is also correct: most people still don't "get it" because most people have not read Phil's committee's report and taken it to heart (on this and the other points it clarifies--most centrally that ISBN is a _product identifier for the supply chain_ which is why the ambiguity in its use is such a problem).

I especially like Phil's distinction between the rights transaction and the purchase transaction.

--Bill K

-----Original Message-----
From: Madans, Phil [mailto:Phil.Madans@hbgusa.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2014 1:40 PM
To: Bill Kasdorf; LAURA DAWSON; Ivan Herman; W3C Public Digital Publishing IG Mailing List
Subject: Re: As an aside, a possibly interesting read....

As the current chair of the BISG Identification Committee I would have to take some exception to point number 2 below. The ID committee, after a long and careful process, published two iterations of a Policy Statement dealing with the identification of digital product, which goes into detail and provides use cases for the assignment ofISBNs including those for various forms of DRM.  And that is the key here. DRM, or usage constraints, are complex with digital products.  Kobo using Adobe DRM part of the transaction with a customer is one form.  A publisher allowing both the sale and rental of the same digital product is another, as is a provider limiting what the end customer can do with content in terms of printing, or not printing.  I can go into more detail here but the Policy Paper is freely available here:
https://www.bisg.org/best-practices-identifying-digital-content-0. So there is guidance out there.

The confusion, which is echoed in the Digital Preservation piece, is this conception, or misconception about buying a physical book and only licensing digital content. If the content in question is copyrighted, then you are always licensing the content. For a physical book you are buying a package of licensed content. While you own the package and can sell it, loan it or toss it in the garbage, what you can＊t do is run the pages through a scanner and sell the pdf version. When you buy one of our hardcover books, for instance, there are two transactions going on simultaneously, the rights transaction for the content and the purchase transaction for the package. For digital content, those transactions happen separately. One transaction is licensing the content, but there has to be another transaction to obtain the platform, the package, on which to render the content you＊ve licensed〞a computer, an ereader, a tablet, a phone.  This is what causes a great deal of confusion and complexity, because there are so many platforms out there and all different abilities and functionality. And with no longer having the constraint of fitting the content to a particular package, you can do so many more things, like adding different content, music, video, animation, sound,use different business models for the same content, different usage constraints. That is, of course, the frustration being described in the Digital Preservation piece.

The ISBN was created to as a product identifier to track physical products through the supply chain.  We have tried very hard to adapt that to the digital world, but in the end, I think there is still a big question about whether the ISBN is the best identifier for digital content in the long run.

As for the work identifier, I think Laura gives a very good summary of the issues.  The ID committee spent a few months trying to come up with a viable idea for a work identifier, and in the end, we could not get a consensus. In the absence of an industry work identifier (the ISTC was 15 years in development it seems), a lot of people came up with their own proprietary ID schemes along the lines Laura pointed out. Whether an ISTC is a real work Identifier or not is a matter of debate. I disagree that ii is. It is actually an attribute of the ISBN〞-hat is how they are assigned.
 Different ISBNs of the same master content might have different ISTC＊s.
Translations for instance.  Abbridged and unabridged audio.  They can be linked, so one ISBN may have multiple ISTC＊s associated with it. There are those of us that believe that a Work identifier should sit on a level above the ISBN. Again a matter of debate. There were very good reasons for the ISTC not being adopted.  The vagueness of how they were to be assigned and the complexity pretty high among them.

And I certainly agree with Laura that it isn＊t going to get simpler.

Phil




------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Madans | Executive Director of Digital Publishing Technology | Hachette Book Group | 237 Park Avenue NY 10017 |212-364-1415 | phil.madans@hbgusa.com <mailto:david.young@hbgusa.com>




On 9/23/14, 12:04 PM, "Bill Kasdorf" <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com> wrote:

>+1 This is a GREAT concise summary of the ISBN and ISTC issues.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: LAURA DAWSON [mailto:ljndawson@gmail.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2014 11:40 AM
>To: Ivan Herman; W3C Public Digital Publishing IG Mailing List
>Subject: Re: As an aside, a possibly interesting read....
>
>I work for the US ISBN Agency and used to chair the BISG Identification 
>Committee (I still serve on it, but had to step down as chair once I 
>started with Bowker, because I didn易t want the appearance of conflict 
>of interest), and I can attest that the identification problem is 
>related to several factors:
>
>1. Mis-application of ISBNs - publishers not assigning separate ISBNs 
>to different formats of ebooks, as per the standard; or publishers not 
>assigning ANY ISBNs to their digital editions - inconsistent use of any 
>standard leads to confusion in the marketplace (and new standards being 
>developed to combat problems that proper application of the old 
>standard could have solved - the xkcd problem) 2. Lack of clarity as to 
>what constitutes a use case for assigning a new ISBN on a different DRM 
>system
>- publishers just don易t believe that different DRM should warrant such 
>a thing; the international ISBN organization disagrees. In truth, 
>because digital books are so siloed on their platform, it易s a use case 
>that practically hasn易t come up yet; until we can read Kobo books on 
>our Kindles, it易s a purely theoretical issue.
>3. Lack of uptake on ISTC, which the paper points out. ISTC has not 
>gained traction (in the US at least) for three reasons: Lack of 
>publisher control (anyone can assign an ISTC to a work - a library, an 
>aggregator, a literary agent - it does not have to come from the 
>publisher, which makes publishers uneasy); inability to successfully 
>define across the supply chain what constitutes a 昆work昌 (who decides? 
>Do translations count? What is a 昆work昌 to a publisher is very 
>different from what a 昆work昌 is to a library, to a retailer, to the end 
>user, etc); the likelihood that different editions from different 
>publishers would be linked and consumers would have more choice 
>(publishers benefit from your not knowing that there易s a competing edition out there somewhere).
>
>I don易t see this issue getting any simpler in the near term, 
>unfortunately.
>
>
>On 9/23/14, 7:19 AM, "Ivan Herman" <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>
>>This is just an FYI: may be an interesting to read. Nothing 
>>Earth-shattering and, no surprise, the biggest problems for the 
>>digital preservation is the unique identification of books and DRM. 
>>But it is a good reference to have... (the first issue is clearly 
>>related to metadata, too).
>>
>>Title: Preserving eBooks
>>
>>Authors: Amy Kirchhoff (Portico) and Sheila Morrissey (Ithaka)
>>
>>DPC Technology Watch Report 14-01 June 2014
>>
>>Full Text:
>>
>>http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr14-01

>>36 pages; PDF.
>>
>>Source: Digital Preservation Coalition
>>
>>Abstract:
>>
>>This report discusses current developments and issues with which 
>>public, national, and higher education libraries, publishers, 
>>aggregators, and preservation institutions must contend to ensure 
>>long-term access to eBook content. These issues include legal 
>>questions about the use, reuse, sharing and preservation of eBook 
>>objects; format issues, including the sometimes tight coupling of 
>>eBook content with particular hardware platforms; the embedding of 
>>digital rights management artefacts in eBook files to restrict access 
>>to them; and the diverse business ecosystem of eBook publication, with 
>>its associated complexities of communities of use and, ultimately, 
>>expectations for preservation.
>>
>>
>>----
>>Ivan Herman, W3C
>>Digital Publishing Activity Lead
>>Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

>>mobile: +31-641044153
>>GPG: 0x343F1A3D
>>WebID: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf#me

>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>

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Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2014 17:52:38 UTC