When an isbn isn't really an isbn...

Now we all know that isbn's are persistent identifiers par excellence, but I recently came across a case where they weren't

I'd bought a version of Valentine Baker's Clouds in the East, the book he wrote while imprisoned for his assault on Miss Dickinson, as part of my reading about the Great Game.

I'd bought the reprint from one of these Indian print on demand companies that reprint out of print out of copyright nineteenth century books.

Unlike some of these reprints this one came nicely bound with a card, as opposed to paper, cover and had a barcode, an isbn, and a suggested price in both Indian Rupees and US dollars, in other words rather than print on demand it looked like one of batch produced for retail sale.

So I entered it into LibraryThing - no such ISBN. Now I know from past experience of having bought books from India that they usually in Amazon's database, so I was a little surprised.

I tried Amazon India directly - no such luck. Neither was it on isbnsearch.org or barcodelookup.com, so I'm guessing it's an invalid isbn generated by the publisher when packaging the book up to make it look like a 'proper' retail copy.

Strange, hadn't come across that before ...