About e-books being FRBR Manifestations: I argue that they can either be Expressions or Manifestations, depending on the nature of the e-book. If it’s a new “born digital” publication containing for insatnce a number of earlier published articles/works, it would be an Expression of a new aggregate Work in its own right.

And another observation: librarians tend to think in terms of WORKS whereas publishers tend to think in terms of MANIFESTATIONS. In the past, the librarian could just say “sure, we have that book” whereas the publisher is selling you a product. But that was then, this is now. We’re now seeing that their needs intersect: the publisher needs customers, and the librarian needs patrons, who are looking for a WORK to be able to unambiguously specify which MANIFESTATION of that work they want.

Here’s how it’s SUPPOSED to work:

–The ISTC, the International Standard Text Code, is the identifier of the WORK. (ISTC is a new standard and it has not been used much yet, but it should be.) A given work should have one and only one ISTC. (There is obviously the question of when one work becomes a different work: a corrected version in a reprint is not, a new edition generally IS considered a distinct work.)

–The ISBN, the International Standard Book Number, is the identifier of a SEPARATELY TRADEABLE PRODUCT, and thus is generally considered to correspond to the MANIFESTATION. Publishers have routinely assigned unique ISBNs to the hardcover and paperback versions of a book, because they are separate tradeable products: if somebody orders the book, you need to know which of those they want. The murkiness comes in the digital era. Technically (and officially) all separately tradeable versions of a book should have a separate ISBN: thus the Kindle version is not the same as the Sony version, and the NetLibrary version is not the same as the eBrary version. . . . You see the slippery slope here. Publishers are gravitating (incorrectly) to assigning an “eISBN” and using it to refer generically to any e-version of the book. That undermines the whole purpose of the ISBN because it eliminates the distinction between distinct tradeable products: the Kindle version is not the same as the Sony version. One way around this is for the publisher to assign an ISBN to the ePub version (and a separate one to a web-ready PDF version, I might add) . . . but this just pushes the issue downstream. My view (and I am currently in the minority here but I think this view will ultimately prevail) is that when another entity (say, Amazon or NetLibrary) takes that ePub or that PDF and creates _their_ version, THEY should assign a new ISBN to that SEPARATELY TRADEABLE PRODUCT. I think this is completely logical and consistent. However, publishers (currently) see this as “losing control” of the ISBN. On the other hand, many publishers balk at assigning bunches of ISBNs because their systems can handle the complexity.

Sorry to go on a bit but this is actually a huge issue that is preoccupying me a lot these days.

One other point: the “item” in the FRBR scheme is a COPY of the hardcover book, or a FILE on your Kindle; the hardcover and the Kindle version are each MANIFESTATIONS of the written EXPRESSION of the WORK.

Don’t get me going on performances. . . .

–Bill Kasdorf