I hate the way books without ISBNs are done now -- the fake ISBNs clutter up the searches and get on people's wish lists and are generally annoying. I wish there was a way to assign *one* phoney ISBN to every book without one. Say you wanted to enter a book without an ISBN, you would enter the title and author and it would generate one like now, or if there already *was* one in use, give you that number to use.  There'd be no way to tell edtions apart, of course, but there's no way now so it doesn't make any difference.

I wish they'd just delete them once that book was ordered and require people to repost them w/o an ISBN. 

There is someone tagging the short ISBNs as short numbers.  I hope that will at least get them off WLs.

I don't think anything prevents you from posting a book to a 5 digit ISBN. Some people have posted in the past that they re-use them, with no apparent ill effects.

I know the rules say that it is for a single book ... but why does it matter from a book posting perspective? ( I can see why it matters for Wish List items).

"I wish they'd just delete them once that book was ordered..."   +1

TPTB have stated the short numbers are intended to be one use only.  So IMO they should either delete them after the book is ordered, or leave them in the system and encourage other members to reuse them.  There's a couple I would like to wishlist, but probably not worth the effort if books entering the system will receive a 'new' single use number.

I think the reason they don't delete them is it would mess up people's transaction archives.  But I see no reason at all they can't be reused and I wish the system was set up to encourage that, as I said.

I've posted to 3 of them - albeit it made me a temporary scofflaw. People had wishlisted old books without an isbn (two being old Readers Digest Condensed books), and I figured what the heck on those. So...a couple have been removed (incorrectly) by me. I gave it some thought and didn't see a reason to add another book with a short isbn -  when I could remove one from the system (and make someone happy at the same time). And in actuality, I would not have posted the books with a new short isbn, I only posted those that I knew up front someone wanted - the rest I donated rather than add them manually.