What It Does Publishers, booksellers, librarians and other participants in the book industry require an international system of identifying publications in order to expedite their handling and retrieval. ISBN ensures that ordering, inventory control and accounting are executed more efficiently, whether manually or by computer. The ISBN is meant to appear on the cover and copyright page of the publication, and in publishers' catalogues and advertisements, book-trade listings, book reviews, national and international bibliographies, and library catalogues. An ISBN identifies not only a specific title, but its country or language of publication, its publisher, and sometimes a particular edition. Most books published in French in Quebec use a 2.
Publishers allocate ISBN to their own titles from pre-assigned blocks of numbers.
All publishers outside of Quebec, and English-language publishers in Quebec, obtain their numbers from the Canadian ISBN Agency at the National Library of Canada . French language publishers in Quebec obtain their numbers from the Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec. Publisher prefixes are issued on the basis of this information, along with a manual outlining numbering practices, and a logbook listing all ISBN available to the publisher.