Let me tell you an interesting story about barcodes. No, really. The numbers on a barcode mean something. For example, the first three digits tell you which country a product comes from.

Have a look at the barcode on a book. Wherever you are in the world, you will find that the barcode starts with the numbers 978. But which country is represented by the code 978?

It’s a place called Bookland and it’s where all the books come from.

The Smith’s Standard

Our trip to Bookland begins in 1965 with a visit to WHSmith.

If you’re reading this in the UK then you will be familiar with “Smith’s”, a fixture on pretty much every high street, but for everyone else please let me explain.

WHSmith is a British bookshop chain that dates back to 1792. It was founded as a news vendors by the confusingly-initialled Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna. When Henry and Anna died, the business passed to their son, William Henry, and when his son (also William Henry) got involved, the company became W. H. Smith and Sons. Since then it has lost some dots, some spaces, a “Son”, and has become plain old WHSmith.

And back in the 1960s it embarked on a project that has impacted pretty much every book bought since: the introduction of the Standard Book Number system.

WHSmith wanted to move all of their stock to a central warehouse and they needed a numbering system to identify each of the books in the warehouse. Their solution was the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering system, implemented in 1967 and adopted soon after as the UK national standard for identifying books.

The number is not a continually-increasing count of all the books in existence; sadly, there is no SBN 000-00000-1. Rather – and this will be important later – the SBN is made up of different elements: the first set of digits identify the publisher, the next set is the serial number assigned by the publisher, and the final character is the “check digit” (an error-checking digit used to make sure that the rest of the numbers haven’t been misread).

With the success of the SBN, plans were made to introduce an international version and, in 1970, the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) was born.

The international standard used a 10-digit number. In true British fashion, the UK persisted with its 9-digit version for several more years before finally getting on board with the 10-digit ISBN in 1974.

Like the SBN before it, the 10-digit ISBN was made up of several elements: the “registration group” (an individual country or territory), digits denoting the publisher, digits for the particular title, and a final check digit.

As an example, the 10-digit ISBN for the ebook version of “I’ve Got Your Number” by Sophie Kinsella (to pick a suitable-sounding title) is 0-679-64468-7.

• The registration group is 0 (the ISBN was issued in an English-speaking region)
• the publisher is 679 (Random House)
• 64468 denotes the specific title (and format), namely the ebook version of “I’ve Got Your Number”
• 7 is the check digit

And for the next 37 years, this 10-digit system did the trick.

But there is still no sign of Bookland. To find out why Bookland was introduced, we must first take a detour to the United States.

Barcodes and Bullseyes

It is June of 1974 and we are at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. Clyde Dawson, the head of research and development at Marsh supermarkets, stepped up to the checkout. He hands the cashier, Sharon Buchanan, a packet of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and she zaps it with a laser. On her register the price appears. Clyde and Sharon have just made history.

This was the first time a barcode scanner was used in anger and it was such a momentous occasion that the packet of Juicy Fruit gum is now displayed in the Smithsonian.

The barcode itself was invented in America in 1952, some two decades before Clyde’s Juicy Fruit purchase. The inventors were inspired by Morse Code and developed a design based on the same system of dots and dashes, but with each dot or dash stretched out to form thin and thick lines.

As originally conceived, these thick and thin lines were to be arranged as concentric circles, giving a bullseye-like design. The benefit of this circular system was that it could be read in any direction. Up, down, side-to-side, the sequence of thick and thin lines looked the same. The downside? Any smudging of the ink during printing would render the entire barcode unreadable. This problem was solved by switching to straight lines rather than a circle, as any smudging would just result in longer lines that would still be legible.

The printing issues were not the major hurdle to widespread acceptance of the barcode, however. Rather, it was because those clever 1950s inventors had developed only half a solution. While it was possible to encode information into thick and thin lines and print it on a sticker, no one had yet invented the technology to scan that barcode and read the information it contained. For that, we would need to wait a further 20 years until IBM developed a barcode scanner.

With both the barcode and the barcode scanner now in place, the Universal Product Code (or UPC) was born. The UPC introduced the world to the concept of a barcode with numbers underneath. And those numbers lead us back to our main quest: the search for Bookland.

Combinations and Complications

So we now have two systems of identifying things: we can catalogue books using an ISBN and we can catalogue products using a barcode and UPC. Wouldn’t it be nice if the two could be combined somehow?

Luckily, that is exactly what happened. The people in charge of the Universal Product Code system decided that the UPC for a book should be the same as the book’s ISBN. One number worked for both systems.

And then things got a little more complicated.

With global trade becoming ever more important, an updated standard was introduced for barcodes, called the European Article Number (EAN). Looking at an EAN you will be able to identify the specific retail product type, in a specific packaging configuration, from a specific manufacturer. And, crucially, it will also tell you the country of registration, ie to show where in the world the manufacturer registered the product. (This is not quite the same as saying it is where the product was manufactured, although the two often correlate.)

The EAN is essentially a longer variation on the UPC theme: a 13 digit number, the first three digits of which denote a country.

But here we run into a problem. A book already has an identification number: the ISBN. And the “I” in ISBN stands for “international”. In other words, wherever you are in the world, a book will have the same ISBN. But the EAN needs to know which country the book came from, meaning that the same book might need different country codes depending on whether it was printed in Germany or Japan.

Nobody wanted to introduce a new numbering system for books when the ISBN already existed. But they also needed to make the ISBN work within an EAN system. Which is when Bookland was born.

Bookland and Borders

As far as the EAN system is concerned, Bookland is a country. It has a Unique Country Code (978) just like Bulgaria (380), Sri Lanka (479), or Senegal (604).

It was created in the 1980s to allow publishers to continue using a book’s ISBN within the new EAN system. Take your 10-digit ISBN, stick a 978 in front of it, and – lo! – you have an EAN for your book.

Problem solved and, in the process, a new nation created. Books no longer come from the United States or Uruguay, they all come from Bookland.

In 2007, to bring the two systems even closer together and to increase the number of available ISBNs, it was decided to make all newly-issued ISBNs 13 digits long rather than 10. From that point on, the ISBN and the EAN were identical, and all of them started with the Bookland country code, 978.

But Bookland, like many other countries, is not immune to population pressures. The supply of 13-digit ISBN numbers is beginning to run low.

To address this problem, Bookland has staged an expansion into neighbouring Musicland (country code 979), where all the published sheet music lives. In the future, your books may come adorned with a barcode showing a 978-… ISBN or a 979-… ISBN.

Will the books settle in and live in harmony with their sheet music neighbours or will discord descend upon the new colony? Only time will tell.

What I do know is that in recent months I have created covers for more than one book with a 979, “Musicland” ISBN. In fact, if you are an author and you have purchased your ISBN in the last year, particularly if you did so in the United States, then there is a good chance that you are no longer a Bookland-based author. Your books will now reside in Bookland’s overseas territory. Bookmusicland, perhaps? Or New Bookland?

Whether it starts with a 978 or a 979, the number that appears on the title page of each book and underneath the lines in the barcode box is there as a result of a 50 year journey that has taken us from a WHSmith warehouse, via a supermarket in Ohio, to the mythical country of Bookland.

And if Bookland ever opens up to the tourist trade, I will be the first to sign up for a visit. It sounds like just my kind of place.