Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by quink 499 days ago
Not really. The 978 prefix, or previously ISBN-10 namespace, in addition to a recalculation of the checksum, makes most books go into the EAN-13 namespace. EAN is meant for unique identifiers (“Numbers”) of “Articles” in “Europe”. Later that got changed to “International”, but most still prefer the acronym EAN.

So 978 really is Bookland, as it used to be, and Earth, but the EAN-13 namespace as a whole really does refer to Earth as well. That said, the extraterrestrials can get a prefix just the same?