Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2020 July 15

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July 15

What is the proper ISBN for a given reference

The tools I normally use cannot seem to locate it, I was hoping someone else will have a resource I don't.

• Prajapati, Subhash Ram (2006). Pulangu Nepal Bhasa Natak Ya Sangeet Pakshya. newatech. ISBN 979-9994699925.

It is used at Newar people if that helps narrow it down. Jerod Lycett (talk) 02:39, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

@Jerodlycett: I clicked the link and it shows on Amazon with ISBN "ISBN-13: 979-9994699925". Maybe I am not understanding your question. RudolfRed (talk) 03:31, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

@RudolfRed: It does not appear registered anywhere and the range is not valid. I tend to search WorldCat, ISBNdb, OttoBib, and the Copyright Clearance Center. I couldn't find the publisher to try to figure it out neither ([1]). Usually it's due to either a typo or someone finding it listed on some website improperly, with the off-chance of being self-published with a made-up ISBN (which this one may be). I figured I'd ask to see if anyone had better resources before marking it as a known invalid ISBN. Jerod Lycett (talk) 03:53, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

openlibrary.org shows 9799994699925. Alansplodge (talk) 16:49, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

@Alansplodge: Thank you, marked it as known invalid. I'm guessing it's just a made-up ISBN. I find most of these cases are typos with a handful being something like a first edition had a bad ISBN printed, hence I always do my best to find the proper one. Jerod Lycett (talk) 05:52, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Page numbering in an old World Book encyclopedia

I have an older edition World Book encyclopedia set. In multiple places, some pages are "numbered" with letters (for example, in one volume page 906 is followed by 906a through 906t). I was wondering why they did this. 76.7.197.244 (talk) 03:29, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

The most likely reason is that they produced a new edition where there were 20 more pages in that volume, but the editing was such a large job that they didn't want to wait for it to be done before they printed the edition; and they did the editing from the beginning toward the end and didn't want to reprint a bunch of pages starting at 907 just so they could change the page numbers. This is particularly likely if page 907 is the start of the following volume or a major section or something. --174.89.49.204 (talk) 04:55, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

What are the contents of these pages? --Khajidha (talk) 13:50, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

Could they be Tipped-in pages? --Jayron32 18:15, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

20 of them together? --174.89.49.204 (talk) 18:22, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

The example I gave was from the Sculpture article from the 1975 edition (and it was actually pages 206a through t). It seems to be a continuous article; plus this happens in multiple other places as well. While this one particular case was an extreme example, sometimes it also went all the way down to page X followed by page Xa and Xb, then page Y (rather than X followed directly by Y). 76.7.197.244 (talk) 04:31, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

It is also possible they did not want to change the index when pages were renumbered as articles were inserted. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 13:34, 17 July 2020 (UTC)