Please forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is a SKU number and where does it come from? Is this a part of the ISBN? I am assuming that these are the numbers on the binding of many game books. I did a search of the forum and I guess everyone knows about them but me.

Thanks
Keith

ISBN is the International Standard Book Number and is used in the publishing industry to uniquely identify books.

SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit. It is a unique code assigned to a product for inventory control. To my knowledge it is not standardized; a manufacturer, distributor, or retailer can assign whatever combination of alpha-numeric characters that strikes their fancy. And, since ISBN's are unique numbers, they are sometimes used as defacto SKU's. That's why the ISBN is a searchable field in many online book stores.

There have been several topics posted about ISBN's in the publishing forum, here are two recent ones:
ISBNs
ISBN Numbers?

Julie

SKU is a term that gets tossed around in a lot of different contexts. Here are some of the uses I've encountered:

1) the 7-character product code for a book (in the form ABC####) where the letters are assigned to you by the Games Quarterly Catalog people and you assign unique numbers to each game. So my core book is TCD1001.

2) 10-digit (or 12?) codes that are more properly called UPCs. You need to buy these numbers like ISBNs, so that the first five digits represent your company and the last five represent product. These are expensive, but might be worthwhile for card or miniature products.

3) internal store codes. Many stores create their own bar codes with SKUs that denote different departments and product types, and use the codes strictly for their own inventory purposes.

Note that #3 is the most correct definition for an SKU.

As Julie said, ISBNs are separate. However, a scannable UPC can be generated from an ISBN (the EAN Bookland Barcode spec).

Personally, I think we need more acronyms :)