another non isbn

I've been reading Amelia Edwards  A thousand Miles up the Nile, and I came to the realization that I really needed a copy of Murray's guide to Upper Egypt to make sense of both her's and other nineteenth century travellers' accounts of their travels up the  Nile.

Just as today we tend to follow our Lonely Planet or Footprint guides, they followed Murray's.

It turned out that the best and cheapest way to get a copy was to buy a reprint from one of these Indian print on demand shops that pop up on AbeBooks, so I duly ordered a copy.

It of course took about three months to arrive, during which time customs had sequestered it for examination to make sure it wasn't suspicious in any way, but it arrived, and in one piece:

and strangely, it again had a number that looked like an isbn on the cover. So I tried it in isbnsearch.org:

and again, an apparently valid, but unregistered isbn.

Which makes me wonder if there is some software out there that's being used by these overseas print on demand shops to generate fake isbn's ...

[update 05/05/2018]

and in fact, ten minutes with Dr Google has turned up a number of generators such as GeneratePlus

which when pasted into isbnsearch gives the following result

There's also a number of code recipes out there, including one for making fake isbn's for pre isbn books so you can put them into a library management system and track them as assets ...