Template talk:Cite book/The Elves of Evermeet

Speaking of this edit, why change the position of the dashes in the ISBN? Through the Wizards site they use the X-XXXX-XXXX-X format, and every English (beginning in 0 or 1) book I have ever seen uses this format. Can you provide rationale for using another format? Fw190a8 12:10, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I could never figure out why TSR and WoC used the X-XXXX-XXXX-X format. The correct format is XX-XXXX-XXX-X (see here). Irregardless of how the Forgotten Realms publishers show the ISBN, citations should always use the correct format. --Ebakunin 17:34, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * You're reading the format too literally on the page you provided. In the example shown in the image on that page, the format is indeed XX-XXXX-XXX-X, but the country code is made up of the first two digits in that case, the digits 81. That means that the book was published in India. In the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other English-speaking countries, the country code is either 0 or 1, so the first hyphen should appear after the first number.


 * The next digits are made up of the publisher's code, which for TSR is 5607, and Wizards is 7869. Then there should be another hyphen, followed by the book code, which uses up all the remaining digits until the last. The last digit is the check digit and is always exactly 1 digit, or the letter X. My point is that whilst I accept it's possible for ISBN numbers to appear in the format XX-XXXX-XXX-X (or almost any other configuration), books here will almost always be X-XXXX-XXXX-X because they are almost all English books published by either TSR or Wizards. I hope that helps. Fw190a8 18:38, 1 April 2007 (UTC)