Indie Authors Are to Blame for Lack of Meaningful e-Book Data

And now, let twenty years go by - Barnes & Noble & Smashwords are out of business. Amazon changes its product code conventions and no longer uses ASIN numbers. There is no searchable database made available by Amazon for the old ASIN numbers. Kobo, which owns the ISBN it provided, controls what the Bowker Books In Print or successor database contains and updates the information about your book in ways you would not approve of, and since you have no ISBN number of your own that's the only record of your book in Books In Print. Someone who chanced across a reference to your book based on an old copy from Barnes & Noble can't find it because the B&N identifier is no longer alive, and may or may not connect it with a Kobo record in Books In Print which has a completely different identifier. Does this seem like a good thing to you?