ISBN Info

Every ISBN-13 barcode is split into several blocks that carry information about the book and its publisher. The first block after the prefix is the registration group — the country or language area that assigned the code. For example, group “0” covers the English language, group “3” covers German, and group “7” covers China.

The tool below looks up the registration group of any ISBN, shows the hyphenated structure of the code and validates its check digit:

How ISBN Codes Are Structured

An ISBN-13 code consists of five blocks:

• Prefix — always 978 or 979, the EAN prefix that marks the code as a book;
• Registration group — the country or language area that assigned the code;
• Registrant — the publisher, assigned by the national ISBN agency;
• Publication — the specific book or edition;
• Check digit — the last digit, computed from the other twelve.

The registration group and registrant blocks have variable lengths, so the same code can be hyphenated in different ways. The tool above uses the official range data published by the ISBN International agency to find the correct split.

ISBN-10 Codes

Older books carry a 10-digit ISBN-10 code. The tool accepts ISBN-10 codes too: it validates the ISBN-10 check digit and converts the code to ISBN-13 by adding the 978 prefix and recomputing the check digit. Note that ISBN-10 uses a different check digit algorithm (modulo 11, with “X” as the value 10), so the two formats are not interchangeable.

Check Digit

The check digit of an ISBN-13 code is computed exactly like the EAN-13 check digit. You can use our ISBN-13 check digit calculator to see the math step by step.

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