Book Industry Communication (UK) and the Book Industry Study Group (US) have announced the joint publication of ‘The International Standard Text Code: A Work in Progress’ by Michael Holdsworth, the former Managing Director of  Cambridge University Press.

The ISTC has been described as potentially the most important bibliographic identifier since ISBN. It is a new ISO standard, published in 2009, which uniquely identifies an underlying textual ‘work’ independently of any specific physical or digital manifestation. As such it provides a mechanism for identifying an original text that may be available in many seemingly different published versions with different ISBNs.

Holdsworth’s paper is designed to look behind the official documentation of the International ISTC Agency at the opportunities available to publishers, retailers, rights and collection societies and bibliographic aggregators and systems providers to derive benefit from widespread early implementation of the standard.

Further information about ISTC can be found at www.istc-international.org or www.istc.nielsenbook.co.uk/controller.php?page=1022