On 8 May 2007, Eric Hellman wrote:

> xISBN is free for non-commercial, low volume use.

The xISBN web site clarifies this as meaning <= 500 queries per day for
non-commercial purposes.  Over 500 queries in a day for non-commercial
use, or any number of queries for commercial use, requires paying:

        http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/doc/price.htm

A library would pay $3,000 USD a year to be able to do 10,000 queries a
day.  That's a lot of queries, but I could imagine a big academic library
doing a bunch if they pushed out web tools to their students to make it
easy to check if any edition of a given book (seen at Amazon or in a blog,
etc.) is available in its collection.  1,000 queries a day (which used to
be free) is now $500 USD per year.  It's 20% off for OCLC members.

I'm not sure how to read the commercial price rates, or who would need
10,000,000 xISBN queries, but the prices push the service out of the reach
of the devoted library hacker as well as the small start-up or basement
business.

xISBN's availability, even to and through free and open source tools, is
now more limited.  On reflection, this is one of the rare times on
code4lib when an announced API offers less and not more.  Also, it's the
first big commodification of FRBR, which is intriquing.

Bill
--
William Denton, Toronto : www.miskatonic.org www.frbr.org www.openfrbr.org