Casual Friday - Ode to the Barcode

This morning's Shelf Awareness pointed to a New York Times story about the 35th anniversary of the barcode.   Designed to speed up checkout and control inventory, the committee at MIT who reviewed the barcode thought it wouldn't last more than a few years. 

Boy, were they wrong.  Today, barcodes are used for most products--including the books we publish with our sophisticated 13 digit ISBN. A colleague here at MIT Press laughed as he recalled the controversy surrounding the decision to put barcodes on all of our books.  Now something that we barely notice, many designers and authors were upset about the barcode disrupting the design of their jackets. We've even managed to make them part of the design of our jackets on some occasions.