ISBN

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An ISBN or International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier, re-used by some sites in custom URLs for redirects or searching for books and related data.

IndieWeb Examples

Tantek

Tantek Çelik marks up read posts with URLs of the form /isbn/########## which redirect to Amazon using asin.cc which he built.

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill marks up books he wants to read with an ISBN URL that redirects to Open Library using https://github.com/mwhite/php-isbn/blob/master/Isbn.php

2023-01-18: I updated the default redirect to go to Open Library instead of Amazon

2017-04-05: Added an ISBN URL that redirects to Amazon.com

Tools

ISBN Converter

ISBN barcode generator

Others

History and description

ISBN numbers began use in 1970. Numbers assigned after 2007-01-01 are 13 digits long and known as ISBN-13 while those prior to that date are 10 digits long and known as ISBN-10. Different ISBNs are assigned to each edition and substantial variation of printed books, e-books, and even audio books (except for reprintings when there are no substantive changes) thus a hardback, paperback, .pdf, .mobi (e-book), and .epub (e-book) of the same book should all have different ISBNs.

ISBN-13 numbers are comprised of 5 groups of digits each typically separated by a dash. They indicate, respectively from left to right: Bookland Country Code, Group, Publisher, the specific title, and a check digit.

Sessions

Previous IndieWebCamp related sessions, most recent first:

Brainstorming

Regex to detect ISBN usage plain text

Tantek Çelik here is a regex I created from scratch at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2025 to detect the explicit usage of ISBN numbers, intended as ISBN numbers, in plain text.

  • \b(ISBN-10(\s?:\s?|\s)|ISBN-13(\s?:\s?|\s)(978|979)|(ISBN|isbn)(\s?:\s?|\s)(978|979)?)(\s|-)?(\d(\s|-)?){9}(\d|X)\b

This detects the following prefixes in plain text and looks for a 10 or 13 digit ISBN number with an optional space (' ') or dash (' ') character between each digit:

  • ISBN/isbn
  • ISBN-10
  • ISBN-13

After that prefix, an optional " ", or a ":" with optional spaces on either side (or both sides) of the colon. Then a 10 or 13 digit series of digits (last can be an X) if the length is unspecified, or explicitly 10 or 13 digits if the prefix explicitly specifies the length, again with an optional space or dash character between each digit.

Goal is to add this to my autolinker so my plain text posts that mention an ISBN explicitly are then automatically hyperlinked to an Open Library URL about that book.

This regex is deliberately picky in some parts (only allowing 10 or 13 digits, especially if the prefix says so), and flexible in others (space and or ':' prefix separator, any pair of digits can be separated by a ' ' or a ':') based on looking at over a decade of email across lists etc where people mention ISBNs.

One prefix variant that I saw in email that I explicitly decided to NOT support was:

  • ISBN-No.:

because the No. is redundant like "Machine" in "ATM Machine" and should deliberately not work to motivate the user to correct their redundancy error.

Other resources used:

Example test strings tested with above regex and https://regexr.com/ (from regex):

  • ISBN 99921-58-10-7 ...
  • ISBN 0-943396-04-2 ...
  • ISBN 978-0-596-52068-7, ISBN-13: 978-0-596-52068-7, ISBN-10 0-596-52068-9 ...
  • ISBN 0-596-52068-9 ...
  • ISBN 978-0-596-52068-7 ...
  • ISBN 978-3-901906-33-6 ...
  • ISBN : 978-1-5386-6894-8 ...
  • ISBN 1-4050-0020-1 ...
  • isbn:9781484704219, isbn:978-148-4-70421-9 ...

See Also

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