[Developers] Casting ISBN-10 to ISBN-13

[Vishal Talwar]

We are thinking about standardizing on 13-digit ISBNs for the property /book/book_edition/ISBN on the Book Edition type. To accomplish this, all ISBN-10s (~60K of them) would have to be converted to ISBN-13s. These new ISBN-13s would then completely replace the old ISBN-10s.

Additionally, we are considering the following schema reviews:

1) /book/book_edition/ISBN currently expects /type/text. This should really be /type/rawstring since the lang(uage) field is irrelevant.

2) /book/book_edition/ISBN is not currently unique. This should probably be a unique property. That is to say, multiple book editions can have the same ISBN but individual book editions should not have multiple ISBNs.

3) To make the schema changes, we would keep the current ISBN property around for historical purposes but rename the key and hide the property. A new property would be created which would inherit the /book/book_edition/ISBN key. The change should thus have minimal impact on developers' queries, and no impact on the average user's.

We are looking to make these changes within the next week. Cleanup of bad ISBNs will happen later and should require no further schema changes. If there are any strong objections, please raise them for discussion.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isbn#Overview for more details if interested.

Thanks,
Vishal Talwar