Robert A. Uhl

Get your ISSN!

If you publish a serial, you are eligible to apply for an International Standard Serial Number. This applies to magazines, journals, memoirs — and weblogs: anything which is a non-terminating serial issued in some medium. Unfortunately, the registrars are beginning to resist; apply while you’ve still a chance.

I do sympathise with them, though: the ISSN is only 7 data digits, plus a check digit, and this means that it is only possible to register some 10,000,000 serials. This is hardly a large number: 1 number for every 600 men on earth. The solution, of course, is to extend the number, and write it in hexadecimal. A 7-digit hexadecimal code would have 268,435,456 possibilities; an 11-digit code (with the check digit, it would yield a pleasing 12 digits) would have 17,592,186,044,416 possibilities — nearly three thousand for everyone now alive. Heck, extend it out to 16 digits (including the check digit), and the range won’t run out before the sun does.


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