Call Me Old-Fashioned

If I may go all industry-jargon for a hundred words or so...

I am so very proud of some of my current customers who are already making the conversion to ISBN-13, and not waiting until the last minute to let go of the old ten-digit ISBNs.

But can I just say that after, oh, thirteen years in the book world (hello, coincidence!), it's a bitch getting used to typing those three extra numbers? My fingers just refuse to do it. After a while, you get used to the rhythm of ten-digits. You know when you've keyed one number too few or too many, or when a customer gave you an extra number somewhere.

I know, six months from now, I'll be using ISBN-13 as though it had been here all along. So in five years, at the grand opening of Books That Don't Suck, the great 13-digit crisis of 2007 will seem like nothing.

But ugh, muscle memory is so very hard to retrain.