Cheney_Report
The Economic Survey of the Book Industry, known informally as The Cheney Report, was a paper written by retired New York banker O.H. Cheney, between 1930 and 1931.[1] It was commissioned by the National Association of Book Publishers, and later published in 1932. The purpose of the report was to analyze the overall structure of the book publishing industry and to find ways to improve the system as a whole. The report advocated for several revisions to the book publishing industry, including standardization of the physical size of books, increasing the number of children reading books in the education system, and constructing more bookstores in more parts of the country in the United States. Cheney also correctly anticipated the increasing demand for more books at the end of the Second World War, and sought to find ways to better distribute them.
The most important contribution of The Cheney Report to the market of American book publishing, and to American culture as a whole, was his insistence on the implementation of a standardized form of communication within the book publishing world. Cheney was the first person to suggest some kind of machine based coding system for the organization of books. While he did not present a specific plan for this machine based coding system in his report, Cheney's revolutionary ideas helped spur the creation and implementation, several decades later, of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) that the United States adopted to categorize books.
On the 60th anniversary of The Cheney Report in 1992, Publishers Weekly reprinted the report in full and began to revisit some of the ideas the report originally proposed.