> Somewhere around 11 PM on a Tuesday — it's always a Tuesday — you will attempt to catalog a book printed in Lyon in 1642 and the software will ask for an ISBN. Not politely. Insistently. A red border. A validation error. A small, pixel-perfect indignity.
What kind of crappy software are you using? It would exclude pretty much every serious archive (and quite a lot of home libraries too).
> The problem is the assumption, baked so deeply into most software that it's become invisible, that the ISBN is the identifier […]
Which software makes this assumption? I can register any book I like in Zotero.
> Try selling on a marketplace that requires an ISBN for listing.
Which marketplaces? ABEBooks lists rare antique first editions without any ISBN (which no antique item can have if we assume antique means a century old at least) without issue.
Name and shame them. This article now feels like it describes a real problem, but offers no concrete examples, which makes it feel like a rant aimed at a non-existent problem.
This is AI-generated without even the faintest effort put into polishing the result.
The site's tagline is
> For collectors & dealers who take books seriously
But they can't even take writing one article seriously; I'm not interested in opinions on books from people who take zero care with their own output.
> Somewhere around 11 PM on a Tuesday — it's always a Tuesday — you will attempt to catalog a book printed in Lyon in 1642 and the software will ask for an ISBN. Not politely. Insistently. A red border. A validation error. A small, pixel-perfect indignity.
What kind of crappy software are you using? It would exclude pretty much every serious archive (and quite a lot of home libraries too).
> The problem is the assumption, baked so deeply into most software that it's become invisible, that the ISBN is the identifier […]
Which software makes this assumption? I can register any book I like in Zotero.
> Try selling on a marketplace that requires an ISBN for listing.
Which marketplaces? ABEBooks lists rare antique first editions without any ISBN (which no antique item can have if we assume antique means a century old at least) without issue.
Name and shame them. This article now feels like it describes a real problem, but offers no concrete examples, which makes it feel like a rant aimed at a non-existent problem.
There should be a "falsehoods programmers believe about books"
Reads as if AI wrote it.