The Story Behind ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers)
owl writes:
https://inventlikeanowner.com/blog/the-story-behind-asins-amazon-standard-identification-numbers/
During Amazon's earliest days (1994-1995), CTO Shel Kaphan and Software Engineer Paul (then) Barton-Davis had to write all the software needed to power Amazon.com on the day it offered its website to the world to sell books (official launch date was July 16, 1995). The book catalog was online, and it needed an index (well, it needed several indexes, but that's another story); specifically, it needed a unique key for each item in the catalog. Because the databases they were using to create the catalog were indexed by 10-character-long ISBN (International Standard Book Number), Shel and Paul decided to use ISBN as their key.
Unfortunately - and Shel was well aware of this very quickly, but of course by that time, it was too late - ISBNs are terribly abused in the United States. The company that issues ISBNs, Bowker, charges a lot of money for ISBNs (from the perspective of small publishers, anyway), and publishers don't necessarily read all the rules. Small publishers were re-using ISBNs, and they also took their range of ISBNs and numbered through the entire range, rather than respecting the rule that the final character is actually a checksum, and you can only iterate through some of the digits. (It's actually worse than just not using the last digit, but I'm not getting into that here.)
Shel very quickly removed all 'checksum software checks' (which would have made sure it was a legal ISBN), but Amazon was still stuck with a code base that stored the key value in 10 character strings, and which also stored them in other databases with similar constraints.
Read on to see how the problem was finally resolved - but it wasn't as simple as you might first have thought...
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