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Books of the world, stand up and be counted All 129,864,880 of you. (2010)
Posted by Leonid Taycher, software engineer When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first ...
Well, it all depends on what exactly you mean by a “book.” We’re not going to count what library scientists call “works,” those elusive " distinct intellectual or artistic creations.” It makes sense to consider all editions of “Hamlet” separately, as we would like to distinguish between -- and scan -- books containing, for example, different forewords and commentaries. Even though they are intended to represent “books and book-like products,” unique ISBNs have been assigned to anything from CDs to bookmarks to t-shirts. For example the bibliographic record for Lecture Notes in Mathematics (a monographic series with thousands of volumes) is assigned a single OCLC number.
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