A Genealogical Account of Metadata-in-practice: Magic Numbers and Misfires in Book Publishing

Abstract

What makes different kinds of books distinct from one another? How are these boundaries produced and what does this tell us about the work of book publishing in the digital era? Our research focuses on metadata in book publishing and in particular on how these shape the manifestation of print and digital books in practice. Using a genealogical approach we bring the book’s normally back-office “magic number” (ISBN) to the foreground. We find that the publisher supply chain apparatus was organized around this standard number and presumed the primary interface was the “book-as-container” (the physical book spine and cover). This misapprehension was made starkly public when book listings went online and began to “misfire.” By attending to the history and contemporary life of metadata in the book publishing industry, we account for both its constitutive conditions and contemporary entailments. In so doing, we call attention to the critical agential cuts made by metadata – how they mark out content, make distin...