KINDLE SERIAL NUMBER LOOKUP SERIAL NUMBER
KINDLE SERIAL NUMBER LOOKUP SOFTWARE

KINDLE SERIAL NUMBER LOOKUP SERIAL NUMBER

The ASIN would be the ISBN (if the item were a book and had an ISBN), or a 10 character serial number that represented a base 62 number. I (Rebecca Allen) proposed that we replace the 10-digit ISBN as the key for our catalog with a minimum-impact-on-the-code “ASIN”. (3) the namespace addressable by ISBNs is too small for the number of products we expected to be selling (2) it would be cost-prohibitive to buy ISBNs from Bowker, and (1) other non-book products don’t have ISBNs, CDs, DVDs, Electronics), we needed something other than ISBNs, because:

When we wanted to include other products in the catalog (e.g.

KINDLE SERIAL NUMBER LOOKUP SOFTWARE

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. (It’s actually worse than just not using the last digit, but I’m not getting into that here.) 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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 on the day it offered its website to the world to sell books (official launch date was July 16, 1995).

Kindle serial number lookup