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Sunday, October 12, 2008

Computing: Isbniser Check Digit Fix

Isbniser is a little Perl program I wrote to interconvert book numbers in the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 systems. You enter a book number in either format, with or without delimiters, and obtain its designation in both forms, with and without delimiters. (Non-978 “Bookland” ISBN-13 codes cannot, of course, be expressed in ISBN-10.) For example: 
$ isbniser 0-9340-3563-6
ISBN-10:   0-9340-3563-6   0934035636
ISBN-13:   9780934035637   978-0-9340-3563-7

As it happens, there was a flaw in the original version of this program which resulted in the computation of an incorrect check digit for ISBN-13 codes whose correct ISBN-10 check digit was 0. This has been fixed, and the updated version is ready to download from the accustomed place.

Posted at October 12, 2008 21:23