

Idea Giveaway: Digital Standard Book Number - sathishmanohar

I always wondered about ISBNs in books. I just came to know it costs more than 100 USDs. It may have been a good solution to pin point a book in analog ages. But, With digital services, I think we can do better.<p>So, I think a website, where self-pubishing authors can register their book, which provides an unique identifier for the book will be awesome. Technically, it'll be feasible to give this service for free, since, this site won't have daily returning visitors, and publisher market is comparatively low in number. But, providing the service for free might encourage spammers. I think any amount upto 5 USDs should be still reasonable for a digital unique identifier for a book.<p>A profile for the book, will be maintained online in exchange for the money, the profile will have cover picture, author, current version, publisher etc.
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mooism2
What can this unique identifier give authors that the url of their home page
for their book does not?

All I can think of is that urls do not have check digits, whereas ISBNs and
presumably your unique identifiers do, so typos can be caught without network
access. Anything else?

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sathishmanohar
This can be much cheaper and efficient option for authors to obtain unique
identifiers, this service can be upto date with all digital trends, like QR
codes for DSBN etc.

Also, Only a very small fraction of books have official websites. So, these
pages may also serve as official web-pages for those books, kinda like IMDB
for books.

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tobylane
A hash would be better, it's decentralised, somewhat prevents someone
reselling someone else's work, and can be used to check the book is as it was.
Downsides - Different versions don't appear related by the hash.

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sathishmanohar
Using Hash is a great idea. May be we can use a unique hash for a book and a
version hash (first 5 characters of sha1 hash of that version).

