NOTE on May 23: OCLC has posted corrected numbers. I’ve corrected them in the post below; the changes are mainly fractional. So you can ignore the note immediately below.

NOTE a couple of hours later: OCLC has discovered a problem with the analysis. So please ignore the following post until further notice. Apologies from the management.

Ever since the 1960s, publishers have used ISBN numbers as identifiers of editions of books. Since the world needs unique ways to refer to unique books, you would think that ISBN would be a splendid solution. Sometimes and in some instances it is. But there are problems, highlighted in the latest analysis run by OCLC on its database of almost 300 million records.

So, 78% of the OCLC’s humungous collection of books records have no ISBN, and only 1.6% have the single ISBN that God intended.

As Roy Tennant [twitter: royTennant] of OCLC points out (and thanks to Roy for providing these numbers), many works in this collection of records pre-date the 1960s. Even so, the books with multiple ISBNs reflect the weakness of ISBNs as unique identifiers. ISBNs are essentially SKUs to identify a product. The assigning of ISBNs is left up to publishers, and they assign a new one whenever they need to track a book as an inventory item. This does not always match how the public thinks about books. When you want to refer to, say, Moby-Dick, you probably aren’t distinguishing between one with illustrations, a large-print edition, and one with an introduction by the Deadliest Catch guys. But publishers need to make those distinctions, and that’s who ISBN is intended to serve.

This reflects the more general problem that books are complex objects, and we don’t have settled ways of sorting out all the varieties allowed within the concept of the “same book.” Same book? I doubt it!

Still, these numbers from OCLC exhibit more confusion within the ISBN number space than I’d expected.

MINUTES LATER: Folks on a mailing list are wondering if the very high percentage of records with two ISBNs is due to the introduction of 13-digit ISBNs to supplement the initial 10-digit ones.

Steve Coll has a good piece in the New Yorker about the importance of Al Qaeda as a brand:

…as long as there are bands of violent Islamic radicals anywhere in the world who find it attractive to call themselves Al Qaeda, a formal state of war may exist between Al Qaeda and America. The Hundred Years War could seem a brief skirmish in comparison.

This is a different category of issue than the oft-criticized “war on terror,” which is a war against a tactic, not against an enemy. The war against Al Qaeda implies that there is a structurally unified enemy organization. How do you declare victory against a group that refuses to enforce its trademark?

In this, the war against Al Qaeda (which is quite preferable to a war against terror — and I think Steve agrees) is similar to the war on cancer. Cancer is not a single disease and the various things we call cancer are unlikely to have a single cause and thus are unlikely to have a single cure (or so I have been told). While this line of thinking would seem to reinforce politicians’ referring to terrorism as a “cancer,” the same applies to dessert. Each of these terms probably does have a single identifying characteristic, which means they are not classic examples of Wittgensteinian family resemblances: all terrorism involves a non-state attack that aims at terrifying the civilian population, all cancers involve “unregulated cell growth” [thank you Wikipedia!], and all desserts are designed primarily for taste not nutrition and are intended to end a meal. In fact, the war on Al Qaeda is actually more like the war on dessert than like the war on cancer, because just as there will always be some terrorist group that takes up the Al Qaeda name, there will always be some boundary-pushing chef who declares that beefy jerky or glazed ham cubes are the new dessert. You can’t defeat an enemy that can just rebrand itself.

I think that Steve Coll comes to the wrong conclusion, however. He ends his piece this way:

Yet the empirical case for a worldwide state of war against a corporeal thing called Al Qaeda looks increasingly threadbare. A war against a name is a war in name only.

I agree with the first sentence, but I draw two different conclusions. First, this has little bearing on how we actually respond to terrorism. The thinking that has us attacking terrorist groups (and at times their family gatherings) around the world is not made threadbare by the misnomer “war against Al Qaeda.” Second, isn’t it empirically obvious that a war against a name is not a war in name only?

The post [misc] The Wars on Terrorism, Al Qaeda, Cancer, and Dessert appeared first on Joho the Blog.