Multiple editions but wrong

[Lindig]

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has a book called The Lost Prince (originally published as Godforsaken). There are three editions of Lost Prince on GR but there should only be one. I went to Amazon and got the actual ISBNs for the correct issue. I've combined all three under Godforsaken, but now I want to delete two of the editions. I'm not sure exactly how to go about it, so I need some pointers, please.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

There was one edition that had an incorrect ISBN; I merged it into the correct one. The three remaining editions all have correct ISBNs, so why would any be deleted?

[Lindig]

Because there's only one edition of Lost Prince, not three. As far as Yarbro herself knows, the publisher has not gone back to press for a second edition. And why is the 10-digit ISBN different from the 13-digit one?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

There are three editions. The original printing as Godforsaken; and two from Borderlands Press as The Lost Prince. Why did they release it under two ISBNs? Ask them, but that often indicates two markets (US & UK) or just different distribution channels. WorldCat implies that they are the US and UK editions.

I don't understand your question about ISBNs. The ISBN-10 is always different than the ISBN-13.

[Lindig]

Oh! I wasn't counting Godforsaken as one of the three. There were three Lost Prince edition, and now you've fixed it to be two because of the different isbn -- I didn't know there was a UK edition (and I don't think Yarbro does either). Amazon only has one.

Many thanks!

As to the 10 or 13 isbns, all the books I've seen so far have the same isbn with a 3-digit prefix making it 13 digits, so I thought that's the way it was supposed to be.

Live and learn.

Thanks again.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Oh, I see! The last digit of an ISBN is the check digit. It's based on a weighted sum of the other digits. So sometimes it ends up the same in both ISBNs, and sometimes not.

[Lindig]

Nothing they like better than to confuse us, eh?

I got to thinking that maybe the books I was looking at were all published pre-13 so they just tacked on the prefix, and then post-13 ones get the weighted numbers. Who knows.

But thanks.

[Carin]

All pre-13 ISBNs can translate to a 13-digit. It's an algorithm. I'd guess only 1/50 ISBNs ends up having the same check digit in both the 13 and 10 version. It certainly does happen, but it's not frequent, and the odds of it happening with all 3 ISBNs mentioned here is pretty close to nil. There are some ISBN 10-to-13 converters out there such as this: http://www.isbn.org/converterpub.asp. You just type in the 10, it will give you the 13, voila!

[Lindig]

I got "this page cannot be found" for this url. I'll try it without the extension.

[Carolyn]

Just remove the last period, which got incorporated into the link. It pulled up fine when I did that.

Thanks for the link Carin!

[Lindig]

I got to it through isbn.org and tried it out. It merely added the 978 prefix to the 10-digit I used (one from a real book). Hmmm.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Actually, because of how the weighting works, it's probably more like 1/12 that has the same check digit. And because US & UK ISBNs start with 0's and 1's, the rate at which their final digit will match should actually be higher, I think. (I am so NOT reminding myself how to do the relevant statistical calculations right now. :P )

My favorite ISBN converter (which is linked to in the manual and in the helpful links thread) is the one from the LoC. Among other nice features, if you provide an invalid ISBN, it will tell you what the check digit actually should be.

[Lindig]

Excellent. Thanks.