Do you convert?

[madbaker]

ISBNs (International Standard Book Number, for those bibliophobes out there…) are going from ten digits to thirteen as of January 1, 2007. Any books I buy next year will be in the new format; books published now have both.

I'm curious what people think: should I convert all my ISBNs to the new format?

[Poll #798889]
A few bonus points for correctly guessing the header reference.

Comments

[tshuma]

Wow, am I the only one who cared to vote on the question other than questioning your sanity?

I would keep both formats, but over time, I would convert the old to the new. So that by the time I was done, some of my books would have two IBSN records, but all of them would have an ISBN in the new format. The new books would simply have a code in the old ISBN field that would indicate they were too new to have an old code, or the field would be null for them. It might play havoc with your database schema, but it shouldn't be too difficult to adapt. Regardless, I'd enter both numbers for them for a while.