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From: Pete Dashwood on 6 May 2008 18:37 "HeyBub" <heybub(a)NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote in message news:5a6dnfsfC7ChHr3VnZ2dnUVZ_smnnZ2d(a)earthlink.com... > tlmfru wrote: >> The EAN is actually an upgrade of the current 12-digit UPC scheme. >> The ISBN13 is a way of using the current ISBN as a UPC. I thought >> you were joking when you spoke of "Bookland" but it's true! 979 will >> be used as a prefix "when the current numbers run out", whatever that >> means, and 977 is for periodicals presently under the ISSN. > > "Joking?" The book business is rapidly approaching 1950. We don't joke > about things like that. There is only ONE major publisher in the United > States that owns a printing press (Doubleday for its Anchor Bible series). > There are over 3,000 trim sizes for hardbound books. Book jackets are > applied by hand. Unsold mass-market books are destroyed in situ because > it's cheaper to burn 'em than to print another. > > See if you can lay hands on "Cyberbooks" by Ben Bovi - a thinly disguised > spoof of the book business. In the book you meet the Chinese mathematician > who discovers that under rare, but nevertheless clearly defined, > circumstances, the formula by which royalty payments are made can actually > be understood and therefore must be changed! I got a kick out of the > publisher that put robotic picking machines in their warehouse to gather > book cartons off the shelves. Due to some misunderstanding, the robots > could only reach to the fifth shelf but the warehouse had racks of seven > shelves. The company then hired midgets to ride around atop the picking > machines to access the higher shelves. Of course the midgets were > constantly falling off the robots and getting run over... > > Or the accounting consultant who computd that by changing the glue used in > perfect bindings the company could save five cents per hundredweight. > Unfortunately, this new glue formulation decomposed in shipment causing > not only the pages to become loose but the vapors from the decomposition > formed an hallucinogenic gas that, when inhaled by the hippies in the > bookstore's receiving department, caused them to strip naked and run about > the store yelling "flying turtles are real - they just don't show up on > radar!" > > >> > > It's worse. The EAN believes in an optional, additional, digit (making 14 > in all) to indicate packing quantity. > > Example: > No leading digit = single can of armadillo-flavored chili > 1 = case of 12 cans > 2 = pallet of 50 cases > 3 = truck load of 22 pallets > 4 = shipping container of 3 truck loads > > Each of these will have a different check-digit. > > Fortunately, in the book business, this silliness is irrelevant. > Publishers traditionally assign a different ISBN/EAN to each packing > quantity, leading often to "You ordered 3 PALLETS of 'Collectable > Locomotives' ?!! Have you been sniffing shipping cartons again?" Thanks for posting this. Informative, interesting, and VERY amusing... :-) Pete. -- "I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything." >
From: HeyBub on 6 May 2008 21:50
Pete Dashwood wrote: >> Fortunately, in the book business, this silliness is irrelevant. >> Publishers traditionally assign a different ISBN/EAN to each packing >> quantity, leading often to "You ordered 3 PALLETS of 'Collectable >> Locomotives' ?!! Have you been sniffing shipping cartons again?" > > Thanks for posting this. Informative, interesting, and VERY > amusing... :-) Thank you, I guess. I learned, during my tenure as a cop, that people are basically funny. If you stress 'em a bit, the facade of civilization drops away. Ask any cop, ambulance driver, emergency room worker, or fire fighter and they can tell you stories. Even better than the ones a bartender hears. It is this experience that finely-honed my sense of devilment. Now, I can't help it. There's admittedly not much funny about COBOL, but if you visit the tx.guns newsgroup, we get to comment on real people doing real things. Just today, there's posts on "Man goes all Conan on a camel" (about a chap who said "hold my beer and watch this" then slugged a camel at an amusement park) and "Oh, just another day at the office" (soldier's cell-phone gets its redial button ro his parents tapped while he's engaged in an Afghan fire-fight). |