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The Story behind ASINs – Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (2021)

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Re: The Story behind ASINs – Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (2021)

#31

Post by hef19898 »

seniorsassycat wrote: post #13
philwelch wrote: post #7

Here’s some ASIN trivia from my time at Amazon in the early 10’s. At least at that time, there was exactly one inventory item at Amazon that could change ASINs during its lifetime: Amazon Fresh used different ASINs for green bananas and yellow bananas.

Is it actually a mutate or do you write off greens and add new yellows?

No idea hoe Amazon did it, but I suspect a inventory transfer from green to yellow. That is properly tracked and accounted. You never use inventory adjustments to move inventory, as tose are literally shooting inventory into the aether (negative adjustments) and creating inventory out of thin air (positive ones), resulting in zero inventory tranparency or traceability.

Re: The Story behind ASINs – Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (2021)

#34

Post by bambax »

tharkun__ wrote: post #18
roxgib wrote: post #9

> Unfortunately — and Shel was well aware of this very quickly, but of course by that time, it was too late — ISBNs are terribly abused in the United States. The company that issues ISBNs, Bowker, charges a lot of money for ISBNs (from the perspective of small publishers, anyway), and publishers don’t necessarily read all the rules. Small publishers were re-using ISBNs, and they also took their range of ISBNs and num…

Because you get issued a range and you actually do whatever you want within that range. Like IP addresses. What you do within that range is up to up, you don't actually have to ask the authority for every single number within the range. As a simplification: If you get the number from 100 to 200 to assign to your books but the last digit is a check digit, you didn't get 100 numbers to choose from. You got to choose fr…

To elaborate on your example, if the last digit cast out nines from the previous two digits, valid numbers are 101 (1+0=1), 112, 123, 134, 145, 156, 167, 178, 189, 191 (1+9=10, 1+0=1), 202. So for example 102 is NOT a valid number — it doesn't exist! And if it is used, and someone somewhere tries to validate it, it will throw an error.

Hence the article says:

> Shel very quickly removed all ‘checksum software checks’ (which would have made sure it was a legal ISBN)

I find it incredibly fascinating (and a little bit depressing) that publishers would twist the system in that way, but maybe it has to be expected if something is sold for a large amount of money.

In France ISBN are free; there is a central agency (Electre) that issues them but they don't charge for it (at least not to small publishers).

But EAN/UPC codes are issued by a different agency, GS1, that does charge a recurring fee, and it is expensive and "infinite" (you're supposed to keep paying for as long as you're using the codes). But even them don't charge for the range size; the fee is based on the turnover of the company buying the codes.

Re: The Story behind ASINs – Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (2021)

#37

Post by crabmusket »

roxgib wrote: post #9

> Unfortunately — and Shel was well aware of this very quickly, but of course by that time, it was too late — ISBNs are terribly abused in the United States. The company that issues ISBNs, Bowker, charges a lot of money for ISBNs (from the perspective of small publishers, anyway), and publishers don’t necessarily read all the rules. Small publishers were re-using ISBNs, and they also took their range of ISBNs and num…

For some reason, ISBNs having check digits seems really strange to me. I wonder why. I am sure that Australia's smart meter numbering scheme also uses a check digit, but on learning that it that didn't strike me as odd. Maybe the association with books and "old stuff" makes it seem incongruous to me.

In general, are check digits common in schemes like these? Is it something you'd do if you expect lots of manual copying, or scanning or other potentially-error-producing conversions?

Re: The Story behind ASINs – Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (2021)

#38

Post by dx034 »

crabmusket wrote: post #37
roxgib wrote: post #9

> Unfortunately — and Shel was well aware of this very quickly, but of course by that time, it was too late — ISBNs are terribly abused in the United States. The company that issues ISBNs, Bowker, charges a lot of money for ISBNs (from the perspective of small publishers, anyway), and publishers don’t necessarily read all the rules. Small publishers were re-using ISBNs, and they also took their range of ISBNs and num…

For some reason, ISBNs having check digits seems really strange to me. I wonder why. I am sure that Australia's smart meter numbering scheme also uses a check digit, but on learning that it that didn't strike me as odd. Maybe the association with books and "old stuff" makes it seem incongruous to me. In general, are check digits common in schemes like these? Is it something you'd do if you expect lots of manual copyi…

I get it for a smart meter, you don't want to mix up numbers and provide wrong readings. And they could be read manually and entered into a system, even if they're "smart".

But for books, the worst that can happen is that you get the wrong book. Maybe back in the days when people ordered books via phone it was good to have a checksum, but even then the seller would probably read back the name of the book. So I don't really see how it's necessary here.

Re: The Story behind ASINs – Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (2021)

#40

Post by innocenat »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #26
oaththrowaway wrote: post #5

Years ago I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get a Kindle to "Whispersync" sideloaded books. Eventually I figured out it was as simple as having an ASIN included in the books metadata (Calibre does this automatically now, but it was fun figuring it out manually with Python scripts). Originally I thought the ASIN had to be valid, but eventually realized it didn't even matter, just had to match the patte…

Wow, TIL. So you're saying you can get the audiobook legit through Audible and use a downloaded EPUB and it will still work if the ASIN is in the metadata? This is definitely worth a blog post or something at least.

No. A USB side-loaded book in AZW3 or KFX format with embedded ASIN, and tagged EBOK, is treated as Amazon books. Everything sent via Send to Kindle is tagged PDOC so they behave differently.

Normally, books sent via USB can't use Whispersync to sync reading position between different devices. OP is saying that if you embed ASIN into the book (can just be a random ASIN) and sideload the same books to multiple device, they will sync, too.

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