ISBN Crisis

Indonesia is facing a crisis due to a rapid depletion of available ISBNs. The ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is a unique identifier assigned to every published book. It plays a crucial role in book distribution, tracking, and sales. One of the reasons why this crisis can happen is because of the large number of book publications. A lot of book publications are not in accordance with writing standards, this happens a lot in teen novel books where publishers publish works from amateur writers without caring about the writing quality. Even so, these books still have a lot of interest, especially among teenagers, so publishers continue to print books to meet the demand. The inefficient allocation system makes ISBN numbers not distributed properly. With this problem, the impact for the future is the ISBN crisis or the difficulty of getting an ISBN number to publish a book. Writers will have difficulty publishing new books and access to information and literacy will be very limited because there is no renewal of reading resources. So to overcome this problem, some solutions that can be done are by selecting the papers to be published. By making a strict selection, the quality of books can be improved while avoiding the ineffective use of ISBN numbers. The second solution is to apply the digital ISBN system, with this system the allocation of ISBNs will be more efficient and transparent. Books are the most important source of learning, so the problem of the ISBN crisis must be addressed quickly and precisely.