February 18, 2026
Numbers vs novels, who wins?
The Perils of ISBN
Readers revolt: one story, a dozen numbers—why book apps feel broken
TLDR: Trying to build a clean book-tracking app hit a buzzsaw: one story can have a dozen ISBNs, and sometimes numbers even get reused. The community brawled over whether to track the “work” or specific editions, while suggesting OpenLibrary or Anna’s Archive as better sources for book data.
A developer tried to make a “Letterboxd for books” but slammed into the ISBN wall: search for The Last Unicorn, get a hydra of editions, formats, reprints—each with a different number. Cue the crowd storming in with big feelings. One camp demands “works, not editions,” wanting a simple way to log “the book” without picking a specific hardcover vs paperback vs eBook. Another group fires back: editions matter! As one reader says, the 1930 version of a classic isn’t the same vibe as the modern one—different forewords, fixes, and sometimes whole rewrites.
Librarians weighed in like the Avengers, dropping the FRBR model—think: work (the story), expression (the edition), manifestation (the format), item (your actual copy). Users joked it’s like book Pokémon: gotta catch ’em all. The plot thickens with revelations that ISBNs can hide publisher IDs by market, and sometimes get reused for totally different books. Yikes.
Solutions? The thread split: some swear by OpenLibrary, others argue Anna’s Archive is “more complete,” sparking a spicy side debate about openness vs completeness. Meanwhile, people dunked on GoodReads’ cluttered UI and wished for a clean, click-and-go tracker. The vibe: chaos in catalog land, with a meme-worthy moral—books aren’t parts, stories are souls.
Key Points
- •Existing book-tracking platforms like Goodreads and Storygraph are criticized for cluttered, hard-to-use interfaces.
- •Testing the Google Books API for “The Last Unicorn” returns numerous entries with different ISBNs for the same work.
- •Each book edition and format has a distinct ISBN, leading to fragmented search results and logging complexity.
- •The author proposes modeling and logging at the “work” level rather than by ISBN to simplify user experience.
- •The FRBR model (work, expression, manifestation, item) is cited as a framework to group editions and formats under a single work.