WTF new ISBN system

[nenena]

Ummmm... Whut?

I have a lot of fansites dedicated to manga series where I list Japanese books (and any existing English translations thereof) giving their ISBN numbers. Today I was updating Pearl Song, and I was looking up the ISBN numbers of the new English volumes, and I find that...

Well, great! Now every book in existence has TWO ISBN NUMBERS. Even the ones published AFTER January 1st, 2007 are still being assigned an ISBN-10 and an ISBN-13 number.

Screw that. I'm going to stick with the ISBN-10 numbers for now, because that's what I've been using on all of my websites. I understand that the world is supposed to be switching over to ISBN-13 somehow, but... Well, as long as all new books are still being assigned ISBN-10 numbers in addition to ISBN-13 numbers... What's the point?

Comments

[meiousei.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's an issue with how many books are being published nowadays... they're running out of combinations. I knew it was happening soon, but I didn't realize how soon till now.

I didn't realize that they were assigning books published before 07 a 13-digit code, though. It seems to make more sense to just leave those, and go on with 13 digits now. Odd.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

That's what makes no sense to me. That books, old and new, are being assigned two separate codes. Why not just leave the old 10-digit books alone, and give the new 13-digit codes to new books (rather than assigning new books both 10 and 13-digit codes)? I'm sure there's a reason for it, but on the surface it just looks stupid and redundant to me.